# Chapter 3: The Hunger of Resources Every database is a hungry beast. Before it can perform the magnificent operations we ask of it, Postgres needs to eat. It consumes **Disk IO** to remember things, eats up **Memory** to think fast, burns **CPU** cycles to calculate, and uses the **Network** to shout its answers back to you. Here are the knobs you can turn to feed it properly. See [19.4. Resource Consumption](https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/runtime-config-resource.html) [[Disk IO]] [[Memory]] [[CPU]] [[Network]]