Folks, First off, you'll be glad to know that I've persuaded two of the Sun performance engineers to join this list soon. So you should be able to get more difinitive answers to these questions. Second, 7.4 still did linear scanning of shared_buffers as part of LRU and for other activities. I don't know how that would cause swapping, but it certainly could cause dramatic slowdowns (like 2-5x) if you overallocated shared_buffers. Possibly this is also triggering a bug in Solaris 2.6. 2.6 is pretty darned old (1997); maybe you should upgrade? We're testing with s_b set to 300,000 on Solaris 10 (Niagara) so this is obviously not a current Solaris issue. -- --Josh Josh Berkus PostgreSQL @ Sun San Francisco
