shared_buffers in 8.3 w/ lots of RAM on dedicated PG machine

[Peter Schuller <peter(dot)schuller(at)infidyne(dot)com>]

Hello,

my impression has been that in the past, there has been a general
semi-consensus that upping shared_buffers to use the majority of RAM
has not generally been recommended, with reliance on the buffer cache
instead being the recommendation.

Given the changes that have gone into 8.3, in particular with regards
to minimizing the impact of large sequential scans, would it be
correct to say that given that

  - enough memory is left for other PG bits (sort mems and whatnot else)
  - only PG is running on the machine
  - you're on 64 bit so do not run into address space issues
  - the database working set is larger than RAM

it would be generally advisable to pump up shared_buffers pretty much
as far as possible instead of relying on the buffer cache?

-- 
/ Peter Schuller

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