Hello, I'm trying to make sense of the memory usage reported by 'top', compared to what "pg_database_size" shows. Here's one result: select pg_size_pretty(pg_database_size('production')); pg_size_pretty ---------------- 6573 MB Now, looking at memory use with "top", there is a lot memory that isn't being used on the system: Mem: 470M Active, 2064M Inact ( 3 Gigs RAM, total ). Overall performance is decent, so maybe there's no problem. However, I wonder if we've under-allocated memory to PostgreSQL. (This is a dedicated FreeBSD DB server). Some memory settings include: shared_buffers = 8192 (we have 450 connections) max_fsm_pages = 1250000 (we kept getting HINTs to bump it, so we did) Maybe we should be bumping up the "sort_mem" and "vacuum_mem" as well? I do sometimes see sorting and vacuuming as showing up as things I'd like to run faster. This list has been a great resource for performance tuning help, and I continue to appreciate your help. We've used PostgreSQL on every project we've had a choice on for the last 10 years. (Has it been that long?!) We've never regretted it once. Mark