I am trying to debug some shared memory issues with Postgres 9.3.1 and CentOS release 6.3 (Final). I have a database machine that probably has some misconfigured shared memory settings. It's getting into 2+ GB of swap. Restarting postgres frees all of the memory, but after a few hours of normal usage it will go back into swap. During light usage, postgres will *very* slowly release some memory, but not all. Using top, I can see that many of the postgres connections are using shared memory:
```
top - 09:38:16 up 1 day, 21:21, 3 users, load average: 0.40, 0.54, 0.45
Tasks: 253 total, 2 running, 251 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 0.7%us, 0.2%sy, 0.0%ni, 97.8%id, 1.2%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 6998260k total, 6849048k used, 149212k free, 248k buffers
Swap: 440478516k total, 1981912k used, 438496604k free, 1541356k cached
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
3534 postgres 20 0 2330m 1.4g 1.1g S 0.0 20.4 1:06.99 postgres: deploy mtalcott 10.222.154.172(53495) idle
9143 postgres 20 0 2221m 1.1g 983m S 0.0 16.9 0:14.75 postgres: deploy mtalcott 10.222.154.167(35811) idle
6026 postgres 20 0 2341m 1.1g 864m S 0.0 16.4 0:46.56 postgres: deploy mtalcott 10.222.154.167(37110) idle
18538 postgres 20 0 2327m 1.1g 865m S 0.0 16.1 2:06.59 postgres: deploy mtalcott 10.222.154.172(47796) idle
1575 postgres 20 0 2358m 1.1g 858m S 0.0 15.9 1:41.76 postgres: deploy mtalcott 10.222.154.172(52560) idle
```
There are about 29 total idle connections. `sudo ipcs -m` only shows:
```
top - 09:38:16 up 1 day, 21:21, 3 users, load average: 0.40, 0.54, 0.45
Tasks: 253 total, 2 running, 251 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 0.7%us, 0.2%sy, 0.0%ni, 97.8%id, 1.2%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 6998260k total, 6849048k used, 149212k free, 248k buffers
Swap: 440478516k total, 1981912k used, 438496604k free, 1541356k cached
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
3534 postgres 20 0 2330m 1.4g 1.1g S 0.0 20.4 1:06.99 postgres: deploy mtalcott 10.222.154.172(53495) idle
9143 postgres 20 0 2221m 1.1g 983m S 0.0 16.9 0:14.75 postgres: deploy mtalcott 10.222.154.167(35811) idle
6026 postgres 20 0 2341m 1.1g 864m S 0.0 16.4 0:46.56 postgres: deploy mtalcott 10.222.154.167(37110) idle
18538 postgres 20 0 2327m 1.1g 865m S 0.0 16.1 2:06.59 postgres: deploy mtalcott 10.222.154.172(47796) idle
1575 postgres 20 0 2358m 1.1g 858m S 0.0 15.9 1:41.76 postgres: deploy mtalcott 10.222.154.172(52560) idle
```
There are about 29 total idle connections. `sudo ipcs -m` only shows:
```
------ Shared Memory Segments --------
key shmid owner perms bytes nattch status
0x0052e2c1 163840 postgres 600 48 21
```
Surprisingly, it only shows it using 48 bytes. Any ideas why that would be?
My shared memory settings are:
kernel.shmmax = 8589934592 # 8 GB
kernel.shmall = 2097152 # * 4096 = 8 GB
kernel.shmmni = 4096
Do I need to set lower shared memory limits? In the past, I've run into issues using pg_dump and executing larger transactions with lower values. If I can monitor the shared memory segment I can better understand when postgres is allocating and releasing..
