On Fri, May 27, 2011 at 7:19 PM, Jeff Davis <pgsql@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > 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. Hm, I bet it could make a fairly big difference if wal data is not on a separate volume. merlin -- Sent via pgsql-performance mailing list (pgsql-performance@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-performance