What Is Buffer Pool?
A memory area that caches disk pages to reduce I/O. Controlled by shared_buffers , it's key to PostgreSQL performance.
Why It Matters for PostgreSQL Performance
In PostgreSQL performance work, Buffer Pool affects throughput, latency, or operational reliability depending on workload and configuration.
Practical Benchmarking Context
When benchmarking with pgbench, track how Buffer Pool changes behavior across scale factor, client concurrency, and storage conditions.
Use this term together with workload shape, concurrency level, and scale factor when interpreting pgbench outputs. Isolated values can be misleading without full run context.
Example
Recommendation: 25% of total system RAM for PostgreSQL. Monitor: pg_stat_bgwriter