Subject: Re: Vacuums on large busy databases
From: Jeff Davis <pgsql@j-davis.com>
To: Francisco Reyes <lists@stringsutils.com>
Cc: Michael Stone <mstone+postgres@mathom.us>,
 pgsql-performance@postgresql.org
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Date: Thu, 14 Sep 2006 17:52:02 -0700
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On Thu, 2006-09-14 at 20:04 -0400, Francisco Reyes wrote:
> Michael Stone writes:
> 
> > On Thu, Sep 14, 2006 at 04:30:46PM -0400, Francisco Reyes wrote:
> >>Right now adding up from ps the memory I have about 2GB.
> > 
> > That's not how you find out how much memory you have. Try "free" or 
> > somesuch.
> 
> Wasn't trying to get an accurate value, just a ballpark figure.
> 
> When you say "free" are you refering to the free value from top? or some 
> program called free?
> 

Any long-running system will have very little "free" memory. Free memory
is wasted memory, so the OS finds some use for it.

The VM subsystem of an OS uses many tricks, including the sharing of
memory among processes and the disk buffer cache (which is shared also).
It's hard to put a number on the memory demands of a given process, and
it's also hard to put a number on the ability of a system to accommodate
a new process with new memory demands.

You have 8GB total, which sounds like plenty to me. Keep in mind that if
you have the shared_memory all allocated on physical memory (i.e.
"kern.ipc.shm_use_phys: 1" on FreeBSD), then that amount of physical
memory will never be available to processes other than postgres. At 2GB,
that still leaves 6GB for the other process, so you should be fine.

Regards,
	Jeff Davis