Really? Wow! Common wisdom in the past has been that values above a couple of hundred MB will degrade performance. Have you done any benchmarks on 8.2.x that show that you get an improvement from this, or did you just take the "too much of a good thing is wonderful" approach?
Not to be rude, but there's more common wisdom on this particular subject than anything else in postgres I'd say ;) I think I recently read someone else on this list who's laundry-listed the recommended memory values that are out there these days and pretty much it ranges from what you've just said to "half of system memory".
I've tried many memory layouts, and in my own experience with this huge DB, more -does- appear to be better but marginally so; more memory alone won't fix a speed problem. It may be a function of how much reading/writing is done to the DB and if fsync is used or not if that makes any sense :) Seems there's no "silver bullet" to the shared_memory question. Or if there is, nobody can agree on it ;)
Anyway, talk to you later! Steve
