Re: Out of memory error when doing an update with IN clause

Sean Shanny <shannyconsulting@earthlink.net> writes:
> There are no FK's or triggers on this or any of the tables in our
> warehouse schema.  Also I should have mentioned that this update will
> produce 0 rows as these values do not exist in this table.

Hm, that makes no sense at all ...

> Here is output from the /usr/local/pgsql/data/servlerlog when this fails:
> ...
> DynaHashTable: 534773784 total in 65 blocks; 31488 free (255 chunks);
> 534742296 used

Okay, so here's the problem: this hash table has expanded to 500+Mb which
is enough to overflow your ulimit setting.  Some digging in the source
code shows only two candidates for such a hash table: a tuple hash table
used for grouping/aggregating, which doesn't seem likely for this query,
or a tuple-pointer hash table used for detecting already-visited tuples
in a multiple index scan.

Could we see the EXPLAIN output (no ANALYZE, since it would fail) for
the problem query?  That should tell us which of these possibilities
it is.

            regards, tom lane