Postgres shared_buffers Setting in Windows

Apparently Postgres on Windows doesn’t respond well to a high value for shared_buffers. This thread explains a little, but not definitively. Also, I found that setting the value to greater than 1GB (on a Windows Server 2008 x64 box with 8GB RAM) failed with this error in the event log:

%t FATAL: could not create shared memory segment: 8
%t DETAIL: Failed system call was MapViewOfFileEx.

So, for now I’m going with a conservative 32MB setting.