Tuning PostgreSQL Database Parameters to Optimize Performance
The recommended value is 25% of your total machine RAM. You should try some lower and higher values because in some cases we achieve good performance with a setting over 25%. The configuration really depends on your machine and the working data set. If your working set of data can easily fit into your RAM, then you might want to increase the shared_buffer value to contain your entire database, so that the whole working set of data can reside in cache. That said, you obviously do not want to reserve all RAM for PostgreSQL.