On Mon, Feb 22, 2010 at 22:51, Yang Zhang <yanghatespam@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > vmstat showed no swapping-out for a while, and then suddenly it > started spilling a lot. Checking psql's memory stats showed that it > was huge -- apparently, it's trying to store its full result set in > memory. As soon as I added a LIMIT 10000, everything worked > beautifully and finished in 4m (I verified that the planner was still > issuing a Sort). Well im half surprised no one has recommend using a cursor. Have you looked in to that? I bet that would fix most of your problems here. > > I'm relieved that Postgresql itself does not, in fact, suck, but > slightly disappointed in the behavior of psql. I suppose it needs to > buffer everything in memory to properly format its tabular output, > among other possible reasons I could imagine. Well AFAIK it will dump everything you asked for. So if you said select * from 1G table; It should take at least 1G and potentially quite a bit more formatting and overhead. -- Sent via pgsql-general mailing list (pgsql-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-general
