> > 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. Are you aware that this is a per-session / per-sort settings? That means, if you have 10 sessions, each of them running query with 2 sort steps in the plan, it may occupy up to 20 GB of RAM (if both sorts use the whole 1GB of RAM). regards Tomas -- Sent via pgsql-performance mailing list (pgsql-performance@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-performance