On Aug 19, 2009, at 7:45 PM, Jaime Casanova wrote:
AFAIUI, work_mem is used for some operations (sort, hash, etc) for avoiding the use of temp files on disk... In a client server i'm monitoring (pg 8.3.7, 32GB of ram) work_mem is set to 8MB, however i'm seeing a lot of temp files (>30000 in 4 hours) with small sizes (ie: 2021520 obviously lower than 8MB). so, why? maybe we use work_mem until we find isn't enough and we send just the difference to a temp file? i'm not thinking in raising work_mem until i understand this well, what's the point if we still create temp files that could fit in work_mem...
Are you using temp tables? Those end up in pgsql_tmp as well. -- Decibel!, aka Jim C. Nasby, Database Architect decibel@xxxxxxxxxxx Give your computer some brain candy! www.distributed.net Team #1828 -- Sent via pgsql-performance mailing list (pgsql-performance@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-performance
