On Wed, 2006-03-22 at 02:04, Guillaume Cottenceau wrote:
> "Jim C. Nasby" <jnasby 'at' pervasive.com> writes:
>
> > On Tue, Mar 21, 2006 at 02:03:19PM +0100, Guillaume Cottenceau wrote:
> > > "Jim C. Nasby" <jnasby 'at' pervasive.com> writes:
> > >
> > > > On Tue, Mar 21, 2006 at 10:40:45PM +1200, Mark Kirkwood wrote:
> > > > > I was going to recommend higher - but not knowing what else was running,
> > > > > kept it to quite conservative :-)... and given he's running java, the
> > > > > JVM could easily eat 512M all by itself!
> > > >
> > > > Oh, didn't pick up on java being in the mix. Yeah, it can be a real pig.
> > > > I think people often place too much emphasis on having a seperate
> > > > application server, but in the case of java you often have no choice.
> > >
> > > Fortunately the servers use 2G or 4G of memory, only my test
> > > machine had 1G, as I believe I precised in a message; so I'm
> > > definitely going to use Mark's advices to enlarge a lot the
> > > shared buffers. Btw, what about sort_mem? I have seen it only
> > > little referenced in the documentation.
> >
> > The biggest issue with setting work_mem (you're not doing current
> > development on 7.4 are you?) is ensuring that you don't push the server
>
> Yes, we use 7.4.5 actually, because "it just works", so production
> wants to first deal with all the things that don't work before
> upgrading. I have recently discovered about the background writer
> of 8.x which could be a supplementary reason to push for an
> ugprade though.
Imagine you get a call from the manufacturer of your car. There's a
problem with the fuel pump, and, in a small percentage of accidents,
your car could catch fire and kill everyone inside.
Do you go in for the recall, or ignore it because you just want your car
to "just work?"
In the case of the third number in postgresql releases, that's what
you're talking about. the updates that have come after the 7.4.5
version, just talking 7.4 series here, have included a few crash and
data loss fixes. Rare, but possible.
Don't worry about upgrading to 8.x until later, fine, but you should
really be upgrading to the latest patch level of 7.4.
I fight this same fight at work, by the way. It's hard convincing
people that the updates are security / crash / data loss only...