Re: Auto-tuning work_mem and maintenance_work_mem

All,

So, I did an informal survey last night a SFPUG, among about 30
PostgreSQL DBAs and developers. While hardly a scientific sample, it's
a data point on what we're looking at for servers.

Out of the 30, 6 had one or more production instances of PostgreSQL
running on machines or VMs with less than 1GB of RAM. Out of those 5
had already edited their PostgreSQL.conf extensively. Perhaps more
importantly, for four out of the 6, the low-memory Postgres instance(s)
was an older version (8.2 to 9.0) which they did not expect to upgrade.
Also, note that a couple of the 6 were consultants, so they were
speaking for dozens of customer servers.

As a second data point, Christophe and I did a quick survey of the
database of server information on our clients, which include a bunch of
cloud-hosted web companies. We found two PostgreSQL VMs which did not
have 1GB or more RAM, out of a few hundred.

Now, obviously, there's some significant sample bias in the above, but I
think it gives support to the assertion that we shouldn't really be
worrying about PostgresQL running well out-of-the-box on machines with <
1GB of RAM.

--
Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL Experts Inc.
http://pgexperts.com