Tom Lane wrote:
Since this is just a bog-standard Mini with 512M memory, it was pretty thoroughly on its knees by this point :-(. I'm not sure how to find out about allocated swap space in OS X, but my bet is that the above message should be understood as "totally out of virtual memory".
just so you can look into it for your own curiosity ;-) - Mac OS X uses the startup disk for VM storage. You can find the files in - /var/vm
You will find the swapfiles there, the size of the swapfiles progressively get larger - swapfile0 and 1 are 64M then 2 is 128M, 3 is 256M, 4 is 512M, 5 is 1G.... each is preallocated so it only gives you a rough idea of how much vm is being used. You would run out when your startup disk is full, though most apps probably hit the wall at 4G of vm unless you have built a 64bit version.
The 4G (32bit) limit may be where you hit the out of memory errors (or is postgres get around that with it's caching?).
-- Shane Ambler pgSQL@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Get Sheeky @ http://Sheeky.Biz
