For whatever reason, Postgres at one point starts using several gigabytes of memory, which eventually slows down the system until it no longer responds.
At first I assumed I had unintentionally assigned to much memory to Postgres, but I observe the same behavior even if I use the default postrgresql.conf.
Then I thought there may be some problem with the system itself, but it has passed several load tests, and I observed the same problem on a second system.
I am was using 7.4, and now 8.0, on a machine running Fedora Core 2.
Any ideas? Is this a known problem, or should Postgres be able to handle this? May be tricky to reproduce the problem, as a lot of data is required, but I can post the DDL/DML statements I am using if this helps.
---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 4: Don't 'kill -9' the postmaster