Is Your Postgres Query Starved for Memory?

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Is Your Postgres Query Starved for Memory?

For years or even decades, I’ve heard about how important it is to optimize my SQL statements and database schema. When my application starts to slow down, I look for missing indexes; I look for unnecessary joins; I think about caching results with a materialized view.

But instead, the problem might be my Postgres server was not installed and tuned properly. Buried inside the postgresql.conf file is an obscure, technical setting called work_mem. This controls how much “working memory” your Postgres server allocates for each sort or join operation. The default value for this is only 4MB:

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