thanks for replies everyone platform is Debian 2.6 btw Heres how i got temp fix (i dont have much background in postgresql, so dont kick me hard): few months ago old admin upgraded to 6GB of ram and increased shared_buffers in posgresql.conf from 16384 to 393216 (3GB) He also modifed sysctl to look like this: ----- kernel.shmmax=4294967296 kernel.shmall=536870912 ----- I looked in top command, and dmesg, both indicate 6GB of ram. So I started gradually increase "sysctl -w kernel.shmmax=xxx" during that i was checking out /proc/sys/kernel/shmmax it was keeping up with corresponding values until i reached that number - 4294967296, it was showing "0" instead. so i lowered it to 4200000000, about highest number that would not null that /proc value. Still wouldnt start :( but with different error now, didnt save it After that i decreased shared_buffers back to 16384, and it worked. Didnt mess with it anymore for right now, don't want to experiment on live server. Old admin is not around anymore, so I sort of inherited responsibility for the server, but I don't know much about postgresql yet. So, whats the optimum values for this amount of memory as far as SHMALL, MAX and shared_buffers? Database size is about 115GB, daily traffic is about 800MB. Thanks alot -Nik
