On Tue, 9 Sep 2008, Tom Lane wrote:
How do you come to that conclusion? Leaving off the unit entirely certainly doesn't make the user's intent clearer.
Same way I do all my conclusions in this area--talking to people in the field regularly who've never configured a postgresql.conf before. I highly recommend it for a fresh view.
Here's how this works every time I go throught it. When you first encounter someone who is new to PostgreSQL, after they find out "shared_buffers" is a memory allocation they presume it's in bytes until they find out otherwise. And then they're slightly annoyed that a) if they accidentally don't include a unit all the values get way bigger because of some backward compatibility nonsense they don't care about and b) that it's case sensitive. Since some of the arguments against (b) ("Mb could mean megabits!") diminish if the recommended practice is to just keep the multiplier in there, so the byte part of the unit is optional and not used by the default postgresql.conf, that seems the most reasonable way to proceed to me.
Unlike things like network speed where it's more complicated, memory is measured in bytes unless there's a different multiplier attached by most people. Greg Stark already made this same observation yesterday: "But the point is that yes, people expect to type "100M" or "1G" and have that work. Plenty of us do it all the time with dd or other tools already."
I don't actually expect any adjustment here but was getting a little bored watching everyone replay http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2006-07/msg01229.php with barely any changes from the first time.
-- * Greg Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
