Carlos Moreno <moreno_pg@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > ... But, wouldn't it make sense that the configure script > determines the amount of physical memory and perhaps even do a HD > speed estimate to set up defaults that are closer to a > performance-optimized > configuration? No. Most copies of Postgres these days are executed on machines very far away from where the code was built. It's a little bit safer to try to tune things at initdb time ... as indeed we already do. But the fundamental problem remains that we don't know that much about how the installation will be used. For example, the planner configuration parameters turn out to have not that much to do with the absolute speed of your drive, and a whole lot to do with the ratio of the size of your database to the amount of RAM you've got; and the ultimate size of the DB is one thing initdb certainly can't guess. Also, there is an extremely good reason why Postgres will never be set up to try to take over the whole machine by default: most of the developers run multiple postmasters on their machines. regards, tom lane
