A basic server configuration checklist

PostgreSQL arrives configured for use on a shared system, though many people want to run dedicated database systems. The PostgreSQL project wishes to ensure that PostgreSQL will play nicely with other server software and will not assume that it has access to full server resources. If you, as the system administrator, know that there is no other important server software running on the system, then you can crank the values up much higher. The default values are conservative, so for many workloads, you will want a much larger value.

Getting ready

Before we start, we need to know two sets of information:

• The size of the physical RAM that will be dedicated to PostgreSQL
• The types of applications for which you will use PostgreSQL

How to do it…

If your database is larger than 128 megabytes (MB), then you'll probably benefit from increasing shared_buffers, the physical cache size. You can increase...