Practical Memory Tuning for PostgreSQL

Grant McAlister

This talk will first introduce the different ways PostgreSQL can use memory, from the operating system, to cluster wide and then into per session and per operation. From there we will dive into specifics around different PostgreSQL parameters like shared_buffers, work_mem, maintenance_work_mem and how to set them depending on your workload. The presentation will also cover some of the lesser known ways that PostgreSQL will consume memory, how you can diagnose what is using the memory in your PostgreSQL cluster and possible ways to avoid running out of memory. Additionally the talk we will cover the importance of hugepages for not only performance but memory usage on large memory systems.