thank you all. We will upgrade to 64bit postgres 9.2.5 and take all your suggestions for that. Mean while will run the pg_reorg or pg_repack to take the bloat of the DB. Also pg_repack not installing on the solaris . I will try pg_reorg.
>thanks for the advice. One question I have is if I increase the >shared_buffers to 16GB, then it won't restart because for the 32 bit version >of postgres , we can't have shared buffers more than 3.2 GB right ? ( this >from various blogs that I have read )
Hm.. looks like I missed this fact. Is it possible to install the 64bit one?
indeed, I note the original post also states he has 64GB ram. Its crazy to run a 32bit kernel even with PAE with that large of a physical memory. the PAE page tables all have to fit in 1GB kernel address space, and 32bit style PAE page tables sufficient to utilize 64gb physical memory will about kill you. Even without the PAE page table size issue, no process can see more than 3GB of this memory, making it quite hard to fully utilize the system.
updating this system to a 64bit kernel and 64bit postgres will result in much higher performance overall. if the OP is in fact already running a 64bit kernel, he should upgrade postgres to 64bit. note, this will require a dump/initdb/restore as they aren't binary compatible.
-- john r pierce 37N 122W somewhere on the middle of the left coast
