Bruce Momjian wrote: > > Thanks. Interesting. Hard to imagine what they were thinking when they > put this code in.
Way back in the day, when dinosaurs ruled the earth, or at least the server room, many applications were written with rather bad memory allocation semantics: they'd grab a bunch of memory and not necessarily use it for anything. Typically you could specify a maximum memory allocation amount for the program but the problem was that it would grab exactly that amount, and it's obviously better for it to be a bit more dynamic. That in itself isn't a terribly bad thing ... if you have enough actual memory to deal with it. Problem is, back then most systems didn't have enough memory to deal with multiple programs behaving that way. Overcommit was designed to account for that behavior. It's not ideal at all but it's better to have that option than not. Overcommit isn't really necessary today because of the huge amount of memory that you can put into a system for cheap (HP servers excluded, they want some serious cash for memory). -- Kevin Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 5: Have you checked our extensive FAQ? http://www.postgresql.org/docs/faqs/FAQ.html