I still think my previous proposal of increasing the defaults for work_mem and maintenance_work_mem by 4X would serve many more people well than it would serve poorly. I haven't heard anyone disagree with that notion. Does anyone disagree? Should we do it?
I think that it makes sense to do that. Those are still reasonable defaults for a machine with 2GB of RAM, maybe even with less. We're talking about putting this only in a release that will come out in 2014. How many machines used for a database server that new will have less than that?
A lot. A whole lot, more than what most people have in production with more than that. You are forgetting a very large segment of the population who run... VMs.
Why don't we just have 3 default config files:
2GB memory 4GB memory 8GB memory
But what would go in each of those files? Once we agree on what would be in them, why not just have a continuous knob that does that same thing?
Would your suggestion for the 2GB file have work_mem be at least 4 MB?