On Fri, 7 Mar 2008, Anton Melser wrote:

We have a web app that is using a 32 bit 8.1.4 (I know but upgrading
is not an option for another couple of months...)

You do know that upgrading takes a second if you do it right? You might want to avoid VACUUM FULL until you can upgrade to >=8.1.9.

I did, however, realise that I don't (didn't?) understand what shmmax
REALLY is.

It's just a limit on how much shared memory a process can allocate. The database server will allocate what it wants regardless, and all SHMMAX can do is cause that to fail and the server to crash (on startup). If your primary thing running here is PostgreSQL, you might as well set it to the maximum you can so it gets out of the way. A popular setting is 2GB:

kernel.shmmax=2147483648

With 6GB of RAM, after that you could merrily increase shared_buffers to 200000 or so and possibly increase performance. Just watch your checkpoints--they'll have more activity as you increase the buffer size, and from your description you've still got checkpoint_segments at the tiny default size. You say this is a web app, those typically aren't write heavy so you'll probably be OK.

--
* Greg Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD

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