On Fri, Nov 18, 2005 at 12:35:06AM +0100, Guillaume Smet wrote: > sort_mem = 32768 I would be very suspicious of that much memory for sort. Please see the docs for what that does. That is the amount that _each sort_ can allocate before spilling to disk. If some set of your users are causing complicated queries with, say, four sorts apiece, then each user is potentially allocating 4x that much memory. That's going to wreak havoc on your disk buffers (which are tricky to monitor on most systems, and impossible on some). This'd be the first knob I'd twiddle, for sure. A -- Andrew Sullivan | ajs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx It is above all style through which power defers to reason. --J. Robert Oppenheimer ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 9: In versions below 8.0, the planner will ignore your desire to choose an index scan if your joining column's datatypes do not match