Dear subhuman filth, I know you’re probably too busy fornicating with your toothless inbred sister to read this, and your unkempt diaper-strewn trailer likely isn’t compatible with such technological advancements such as the internet, but we need to talk, provided you’re even capable of understanding English sentences that don’t include phrases such as “Y’all” or “Hold my beer!”, you hopelessly ignorant Redneck. Stop beating your pitbull with your fourth extra copy of the Holy Bible for one goddamn second, and listen here.

To support more of my tinkering in an effort to test various Postgres cluster configurations, I decided it would be really nifty to have a virtual server. I could not only spin up VMs and containers to validate architectures, but experiment to my heart’s content with other potential technologies. At first, I was going to buy an Antsle. But the fact such a thing existed made me wonder what other kinds of dedicated virtual device hardware might exist.

Postgres is one of those database engines that carves out a niche and garners adherents with various levels of religious zeal. The community, while relatively small when compared to that of something like MongoDB, is helpful almost to a fault. Members from the freshest minted newb to the most battle tested veteran will often trip over themselves to answer questions found in the various dedicated forums, mailing lists, and chat rooms.

The Postgres system catalog is a voluminous tome of intriguing metadata both obvious and stupendously esoteric. When inheriting a Postgres database infrastructure from another DBA, sometimes it falls upon us to dig into the writhing confines to derive a working knowledge of its lurking denizens. The trick is to do this before they burst forth and douse us with the database’s sticky innards and it experiences a horrible untimely demise.

Recently on the pgsql-performance mailing list, a question popped up regarding Postgres RAM usage. In this instance Pietro wondered why Postgres wasn’t using more RAM, and why his process was taking so long. There were a few insightful replies, and they’re each interesting for reasons that aren’t immediately obvious. Let’s see what is really going on here, and perhaps answer a question while we’re at it. Pietro presents several postgresql.conf settings, but here are the ones that matter: