Decibel! <decibel@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > I'm finding this rather interesting report from top on a Debian box... > Mem: 32945280k total, 32871832k used, 73448k free, 247432k buffers > Swap: 1951888k total, 42308k used, 1909580k free, 30294300k cached > So how is it that linux thinks that 30G is cached? Why would you think that a number reported by the operating system has something to do with Postgres' shared memory? I might be mistaken, but I think that in this report "cached" indicates the amount of memory in use for kernel disk cache. (No idea what the separate "buffers" entry means, but it's obviously not all of the disk buffers the kernel has got.) It appears that the kernel is doing exactly what it's supposed to do and using any not-currently-called-for memory for disk cache ... regards, tom lane ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 4: Have you searched our list archives? http://archives.postgresql.org