> Is that how it works for an index as well? I just found out that I have an
> index that is 35GB, and the table is 85GB. ( I will look into the index, it
> works fine, but an index that is almost one third of the size of the table,
> seems a little bit strange. )
> So if it works the same way and the index uses a B-tree, I assume it only
> loads the pages that contains the subpart of the index that are relevant, is
> this correct?
Yes.
See shared_buffers:
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.3/static/runtime-config-resource.html
...Robert