On Thu, 2011-05-26 at 09:31 -0500, Merlin Moncure wrote: > Where they are most helpful is for masking of i/o if > a page gets dirtied >1 times before it's written out to the heap Another possible benefit of higher shared_buffers is that it may reduce WAL flushes. A page cannot be evicted from shared_buffers until the WAL has been flushed up to the page's LSN ("WAL before data"); so if there is memory pressure to evict dirty buffers, it may cause extra WAL flushes. I'm not sure what the practical effects of this are, however, but it might be an interesting thing to test. Regards, Jeff Davis -- Sent via pgsql-performance mailing list (pgsql-performance@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-performance