Simon Riggs <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > I wasn't very happy with effective_cache_size and not happy with > shared_buffers either. If building hash indexes is memory critical then > we just need to say so and encourage others to set memory use correctly. > People are already aware that maintenance_work_mem needs to be increased > for large index builds and we will confuse people if we ignore that and > use another parameter instead.
I think you've got this completely backwards. The general theory about maintenance_work_mem is "set it as large as you can stand it". The issue at hand here is that the crossover point for hash index sort building seems to be a good deal less than all-the-memory-you-have. Perhaps there is a case for giving this behavior its very own configuration parameter; but seeing that we still don't have all that much of a use case for hash indexes at all, I don't feel a need to do that yet. In any case, tying it to maintenance_work_mem is certainly wrong. regards, tom lane -- Sent via pgsql-patches mailing list (pgsql-patches@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-patches