Getting Started With Postgres on Red Hat 7.0 Page 2

Step 3: Postmaster and Options

Postmaster has several options that I will give a brief description of:

1) -B = Sets the number of shared-memory disk buffers
(Must be at least 2 times as many as the number of server processes). Each buffer is 8k of memory.
2) -D = Specifies the database directory
3) -N = Sets the max number of Postgres server processes
4) -S = Starts the postmaster in silent mode (No debug information)
5) -d = Debug Level
6) -i = Opens a TCP/IP port for remote connections
7) -l = Enables secured connections using SSL
8) -o = options passed to the server processes
9) -p = Specifies the TCP/IP port to open by option -i

Step 4: Start PostgreSQL

1) At the command line type linuxconf
2) Click on the control tab
3) Expand the control panel and click on control service activity
4) Scroll down until you find postgresql and click on it
5) Click on start
6) It should say it is running if all went well
7) Close linuxconf

Go to the directory /var/lib/pgsql/data. You will find a file named postmaster.opts.
This file indicates the options currently in use by the Postmaster. It should look something like this:

/usr/bin/postmaster
-p 5432
-D /var/lib/pgsql/data
-B 64
-b /usr/bin/postgres
-i
-N 32

I have found that 32 server processes just isn’t enough and I will be changing this to 128. I will also be changing
the buffers to 512, which gives me 4M of buffer space.
To make this change happen on the next start or restart of postgres the file named postmaster.opts.default needs
to be edited. This is in the directory /var/lib/pgsql/data.
It should look something like this:

-i

I am going to change it to be:

-B 512 -i -N 128

Go back to the beginning of Step 4 and restart postgres. Look at the file postmaster.opts again. It now should look something like this:

/usr/bin/postmaster
-p 5432
-D /var/lib/pgsql/data
-B 512
-b /usr/bin/postgres
-I
-N 128

If it doesn’t then something went wrong. I haven’t found a need to change any of the other options.