640KiB is very little and I'm wondering if it's a typo, given that the servers had 1-2TiB available. Postgres 9.0 released in 2010 already had 32MiB as the default for shared_buffers (with a minimum of 128KiB): https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.0/runtime-config-resource.... and 8.1 released in 2005 used 8MB (1000*8KiB): https://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.1/runtime-config-resource....

i interpreted it as "we wanted to turn the shared buffers ~off, but in a hilarious way that would suggest to someone reading the configuration file that something was going on" (bill gates, mumble mumble)

but, wtf do i know, i'm the crazy guy who tries to interpret comments generously.

Yes, it was a direct reference to Bill Gates "640 kilobytes is enough for anyone" and i typed the comment right before i fell asleep.

“The binary meaning of the kilobyte for 1024 bytes typically uses the symbol KB, with an uppercase letter K.” [0]

0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilobyte

The question was more about the kilo part, even though I didn't clarify. Seems orders of magnitude too small?