On Fri, 4 Feb 2005, Eric Jain wrote: > I'm trying to fill a table with several million rows that are obtained > directly from a complex query. > > 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. Explain output would also be useful. I would wonder if it's a problem with a hash that misestimated the necessary size; you might see if analyzing the tables involved changes its behavior. ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 6: Have you searched our list archives? http://archives.postgresql.org