In addition to systems with small amounts of RAM, there are several situations where even 25% of RAM is too much:
- Early versions: Using a large buffer cache was made possible by improvements in PostgreSQL 8.1. Earlier versions were hard pressed to even use 512 MB of RAM effectively. Unless you intend to benchmark to prove larger increases are valuable, a reasonable upper limit for 8.0 or earlier is 32768 pages (256 MB versions this early don't allow the utilization of memory units for their parameters either).
- Windows: For reasons not yet fully identified by the PostgreSQL community, the Windows platform does not perform well with large shared memory allocations. Peak performance on Windows' installs ...