One regular topic of conversation on IRC and elsewhere is that the settings initdb installs especially for memory use, connections, and so on, are often very conservative. Of course, we tell people how to tune them to some extent, although performance tuning seems to remain a black art. But I wondered if it might not be a good idea to allow an option to initdb which would provide a greater possible range of settings for max_connections, shared_buffers and so on. For example, we might offer a profile which is very conservative for memory bound machines, medium size for a development platform, large for a server running with other server processes, and huge for a decdicated box, and then provide some heuristics that initdb could apply. We'd have to let all of these degrade nicely, so that even if the user select the machine hog setting, if we find we can only do something like the tiny setting that's what s/he would get. Also, we might need to have some tolerably portable way of finding out about machine resources. And power users will still want to tube things more. But it might help to alleviate our undeserved reputation for poor performance if we provide some help to start off at least in the right ballpark.
thoughts? cheers andrew ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 5: don't forget to increase your free space map settings
