On Thu, Feb 23, 2012 at 10:39 PM, Reuven M. Lerner <reuven@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi, everyone.
So it turns out that we're not using 25 GB of virtual memory. (That's what I had been shown yesterday, and it was a bit surprising, to say the least...)
A few statistics that I managed to get from the Windows developers/system administrators:
- The machine has a total of 3.5 GB of RAM
- shared_buffers was set to 256 MB (yes, MB!)
- Virtual memory usage by our process is 3 MB (yes, MB)
- CPU is virtually idle when running the deletes, using about 1% of CPU
- No other processes are accessing the database when we're running the maintenance; there are a total of three server processes, but two are idle.
What is work_mem set to? If all the other values were set so low, I'd expect work_mem to also be small, which could be causing all kind of disk activity when steps don't fit into a work_mem segment.