In response to Matthew Wakeling <matthew@xxxxxxxxxxx>: > > Hi. I have a problem on one of our production servers. A fairly > complicated query is running, and the backend process is using 30 GB of > RAM. The machine only has 32GB, and is understandably swapping like crazy. > My colleague is creating swap files as quickly as it can use them up. > > The work_mem setting on this machine is 1000MB, running Postgres 8.3.0. If your query it dealing with a lot of data, it could easily use 1G per sort operation. If there are a lot of sorts (more than 32) you'll end up with this problem. 1G is probably too much memory to allocate for work_mem. -- Bill Moran Collaborative Fusion Inc. http://people.collaborativefusion.com/~wmoran/ wmoran@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Phone: 412-422-3463x4023 **************************************************************** IMPORTANT: This message contains confidential information and is intended only for the individual named. If the reader of this message is not an intended recipient (or the individual responsible for the delivery of this message to an intended recipient), please be advised that any re-use, dissemination, distribution or copying of this message is prohibited. Please notify the sender immediately by e-mail if you have received this e-mail by mistake and delete this e-mail from your system. E-mail transmission cannot be guaranteed to be secure or error-free as information could be intercepted, corrupted, lost, destroyed, arrive late or incomplete, or contain viruses. The sender therefore does not accept liability for any errors or omissions in the contents of this message, which arise as a result of e-mail transmission. **************************************************************** -- Sent via pgsql-performance mailing list (pgsql-performance@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-performance
