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by mbell 4805 days ago
Another issue is that ZFS is extremely aggressive with caching data in ram (L1ARC). That can eat up memory you'd rather give to the database heap and also tends to skew benchmarks.
3 comments

Yes, but postgres' design in that area actually helps. Postgres relies on the OS caching the data tables for the most part. There is some caching in shared buffers, but generally that's not a huge portion of the memory of your db system. (10-25%, and not more than a few gigs)
Placing limits on ARC (25% for me currently) limits that effect.
I run Postgres on ZFS, and simply limit the amount of memory dedicated to the ARC.