>
>
>>What is the most amount of SORT_MEM it makes sense to allocate?
>>
>
>I've never experimented with it, but certainly the standard default
>(512K = 0.5M) is pretty small for modern machines. In a 2G machine
>I might try settings around 100M-500M to see what works best. (Note
>this is just for a one-off btree creation --- for ordinary queries you
>need to allow for multiple sorts going on in parallel, which is one
>reason the default sort_mem is not very large.)
>
I will run some benchmarks and let the list know the results. If this
can speed it up a large amount, I can get another 6 gig of RAM into this
machine which I hope can let me leave the SORT_MEM at a high enough
amount to speed up our huge nightly batch database reload.
It's a Dual Xeon 500Mhz Machine.
-Pete