On 8/28/07, Andrew Sullivan <ajs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Tue, Aug 28, 2007 at 03:40:03PM -0400, John R Allgood wrote: > > lot of activity as compared to the other databases. We run VACUUM at > > midday VACUUM FULL at night, VACUUM ANALYZE on weekends. > > If you are running VACUUM often enough, then you should _never_ need > VACUUM FULL. And weekly VACUUM ANALYSE is probably too infrequent. I would go so far as to say that vacuum fulls should never need to be scheduled. they should only be run when the DBA has looked at the DB and determined that "something bad has happened" and needs to run it. And even then, reindexdb is usually a better choice. Also, by 7.4 autovacuum existed, even if it isn't perfect yet. It's still better than weekly analyze. As for the top output, I'm pretty sure it's in bytes. 133947392 is about 125Meg as the OP mentioned later is what he has shared mem set to. You said: "we see memory usage peak and then it will go down" What do you mean by this? What does free say before during and after. Here's free on my db server right now: total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 2072460 2043440 29020 0 42980 1891160 -/+ buffers/cache: 109300 1963160 Swap: 2097144 536 2096608 Note that I'm showing 29Meg free. But I've got 42Meg buffers and 1.8Gig cached. My memory's not used up. So, we're all just trying to be sure that you really are running out of memory. ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 3: Have you checked our extensive FAQ? http://www.postgresql.org/docs/faq