On the 7.2 manual it has:
WAL_BUFFERS (integer)
Number of disk-page buffers in shared memory for WAL log. This option
can only be set at server start.
How big is a "disk-page buffer"?
Any recommended values?
I do bulk uploads every day using the "copy" comamnd.
I have my pg_xlog on a separate disk and during the loads I see the disk
stats anywhere between 50 and 800 transactions per second (using systat
-io on FreeBSD). It stays most of the time in the 200 to 600 range.
My postgresql.conf settings are:
wal_buffers = 16 # min 4
shared_buffers = 8192 #64 MB (buffers * 8K)