It's fairly likely that that report is misleading: most Unix versions of "top" report Postgres' shared memory as belonging to *each* backend, and I'll bet taskmanager is doing the same thing. You could reduce shared memory usage (cut shared_buffers in particular), which might make the reported usage drop to say 20mb per process, but you only saved 20mb not 20*5. It sounds to me like you're simply wishing for more than your box can handle. Have you thought about running the client and server parts of your development on separate boxes? Or maybe install an OS with less overhead than Windoze?
Thanks for your advice Tom. And you are probably right - at work with 1.5gig I can even get this + VS2005 + EntMan 2005 open without it starting to swap. I have had nasty experiences running eclipse in both Gentoo and Fedora (even though the production environment is Suse, so it might even make more sense), and with KDE/Gnome these days, I don't think there is much difference with XP... I guess I'm just waiting till a system with native virtualisation (no more reboots!) and enough memory comes into my price range before doing an upgrade :-). Thanks - I'll just have to keep my open apps to a minimum! Cheers Anton
