On Mon, Aug 29, 2011 at 5:01 PM, Alan Hodgson <ahodgson@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On August 29, 2011 02:34:26 PM you wrote: >> On Mon, Aug 29, 2011 at 3:46 PM, Alan Hodgson <ahodgson@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> > On August 29, 2011 01:36:07 PM Lonni J Friedman wrote: >> >> I have several Linux-x68_64 based dedicated PostgreSQL servers where >> >> I'm experiencing significant swap usage growth over time. >> > >> > It's the Linux kernel that does it, not PostgreSQL. Set vm.swappiness=0 >> > (usually in /etc/sysctl.conf) and put that into effect. >> >> that won't help and, in almost all cases, is a bad idea. > > Overly aggressive swapping with the default settings has frequently caused me > performance issues. Using this prevents those problems. On a machine with lots of memory, I've run into pathological behaviour with both the RHEL 5 and Ubuntu 10.04 kernels where the kswapd starts eating up CPU and swap io like mad, while doing essentially nothing. Setting swappiness to 0 delayed this behaviour but did not stop it. Given that I'm on a machine with 128G ram, I just put "/sbin/swapoff -a" in /etc/rc.local and viola, problem solved. -- Sent via pgsql-general mailing list (pgsql-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-general