Re: Windows shared_buffers limitations

"Rainer Bauer" <usenet(at)munnin(dot)com> writes:

> Greg Smith wrote:
>
>>Was working on some documentation today and I realized that I've taken for
>>granted the lore about not using large values for shared_buffers in
>>Windows without ever understanding why. Can someone explain what the
>>underlying mechanism that causes that limitation is? From poking the
>>archives I got the impression it was some page mapping issue but details
>>are elusive.
>
> All I can offer is Magnus' explanation: "All evidence I've seen points to that
> you should have shared_buffers as *small* as possible on win32, because memory
> access there is slow. And leave more of the caching up to the OS."
> <http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-general/2007-10/msg01115.php>

Details are elusive because we have no idea *why* memory access should be
slow. If the pages are all in core and mapped in the memory map then really
accessing them should just be a hardware issue. The OS only gets involved with
a page needs to be paged in from swap or other backing store.

One thing which comes to mind is that it's possible Windows is swapping out
shared memory making having large shared memory segments dangerous on that
front.

Of course it's also possible something more subtle is going on.

--
Gregory Stark
EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com
Ask me about EnterpriseDB's Slony Replication support!