So you have some memory left which is not worn-out when you need it. No, you are right: it doesn’t make sense on most platforms. I believe on solaris the memory is truly allocated if you start using it, not during allocation time, so setting memory_target smaller than memory_max_target results in using only the amount specified by memory_target, so indeed you have spare memory left you can use. At the end, it still means you save memory, even on solaris, which doesn’t make sense to me; it makes way more sense to allocate the resources you have in your system, instead of saving them, from a performance perspective. But it also doesn’t make sense to me to use memory_target, because it can’t use huge pages (outside of solaris). Frits Hoogland http://fritshoogland.wordpress.com <http://fritshoogland.wordpress.com/> frits.hoogland@xxxxxxxxx <mailto:frits.hoogland@xxxxxxxxx> Office : +31 20 5939953 Mobile: +31 6 14180860 > On 01 Dec 2014, at 17:49, Zwettler Markus (OIZ) <Markus.Zwettler@xxxxxxxxxx> > wrote: > > Is there any reason why anyone would set memory_target < memory_max_target? > > It doesn’t make sense to me because why shouldn’t the database use all > allocated memory? Why should anyone save allocated memory for later? > > Thanks, Markus