Thanks for the response, Matthew. > On Thu, 10 Dec 2009, Mark Stosberg wrote: > > What I'm noticing is that the while the FreeBSD server has 4 Gigs of > > memory, there are rarely every more than 2 in use-- the memory use > > graphs as being rather constant. My goal is to make good use of those 2 > > Gigs of memory to improve performance and reduce the CPU usage. > > I think you'll find that the RAM is already being used quite effectively > as disc cache by the OS. It sounds like the server is actually set up > pretty well. You may get slightly better performance by tweaking a thing > here or there, but the server needs some OS disc cache to perform well. As part of reviewing this status, I it appears that the OS is only addresses 3 of the 4 Gigs of memory. We'll work on our FreeBSD setup to cure that. Here's how "top" reports the memory breakdown: Mem: 513M Active, 2246M Inact, 249M Wired, 163M Cache, 112M Buf, 7176K Free Swap: 9216M Total, 1052K Used, 9215M Free So perhaps the OS disc cache is represented in the "Inactive" memory statistic? I suppose once we have the 4th Gig of memory actually available, that would all be doing to the disk cache. > > (We currently run 8.2, but are planning an upgrade to 8.4 "soon"). > > Highly recommended. For performance improvements in particular? Mark -- . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mark Stosberg Principal Developer mark@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Summersault, LLC 765-939-9301 ext 202 database driven websites . . . . . http://www.summersault.com/ . . . . . . . . -- Sent via pgsql-performance mailing list (pgsql-performance@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-performance