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How to get the most out of Postgres memory settings
Best practices for configuring Postgres to maximize RAM use without risking process termination.
When Postgres needs to build a result set, a very common pattern is to match against an index, retrieve associated rows from one or more tables, and finally merge, filter, aggregate, and sort tuples into usable output. Reporting systems, for instance, actually do slightly better with lower settings due to reduced cache hit rates caused by complex ad-hoc queries. It’s a rough estimate of the maximum amount RAM a Postgres instance might allocate to user sessions simply for processing basic queries, assuming all connections are active.
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