Message-ID: <4B72E23F.9040005@magwerks.com>
Date: Wed, 10 Feb 2010 11:43:43 -0500
From: Justin Graf <justin@magwerks.com>
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To: pgsql-performance@postgresql.org, anton200@gmail.com
Subject: Re: How exactly PostgreSQL allocates memory for its needs?
References: <8cac8dd1002092110q45411eb1j63bc1b3ce40f3d2e@mail.gmail.com>
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On 2/10/2010 12:10 AM, Anton Maksimenkov wrote:
> Can anybody briefly explain me how each postgres process allocate
> memory for it needs?
> I mean, what is the biggest size of malloc() it may want? How many
> such chunks? What is the average size of allocations?
>
> I think that at first it allocates contiguous piece of shared memory
> for "shared buffers" (rather big, hundreds of megabytes usually, by
> one chunk).
> What next? temp_buffers, work_mem, maintenance_work_mem - are they
> allocated as contiguous too?
> What about other needs? By what size they are typically allocated?
>    

There  is no short answer to this, you should read section 18 of the manual
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.4/interactive/runtime-config.html
specifically section 18.4
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.4/interactive/runtime-config-resource.html

and performance section of the wiki
http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Performance_Optimization

Here is a link annotated postgresql.conf
http://www.pgcon.org/2008/schedule/attachments/44_annotated_gucs_draft1.pdf

Keep in mind each connection/client that connecting to the server 
creates a new process on the server.  Each one the settings you list 
above is the max amount of memory each one of those sessions is allowed 
to consume.


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