"Barry L. Geipel" <barry@GeipelNet.com> writes:
> When I set shared_buffers to a value which puts the total shared memory
> usage over 1GB, my postgres server fails to start.
You definitely can't set shared memory to more than 2GB because its
allocation arithmetic is done with ints. Not sure why it would fall
over at 1GB, but it's more or less irrelevant anyway, because there is
no earthly reason to make shared_buffers that high. You are much better
off leaving the kernel to manage the bulk of your RAM. I don't know of
any substantiated cases where it helped to make shared_buffers much
larger than order-of-magnitude-of-10000 (80MB). 1GB will certainly be
well past the point of diminishing returns.
You can find more about this in the pgsql-performance archives, I believe.
If not there, try older archives of the other lists.
> Sorry that I do not have a logfile output. Perhaps someone could help me
> turn my logfile on. I am passing -l logfile at startup, but my logfile
> remains empty.
Passing -l logfile to what?
regards, tom lane
