Re: using a lot of maintenance_work_mem

On Apr 9, 2011, at 9:23 PM, Stephen Frost wrote:
> Actually, Tom has a point in that work_mem can be set above 1GB (which
> is where I had it set previously..).  I didn't think it'd actually do
> anything given the MaxAlloc limit, but suprisingly, it does (at least,
> under 8.4).  I'm currently trying to see if we've got anything that's
> going to *break* with work_mem set up that high; right now I have a
> hashagg plan running across this data set which has 2.4G allocted to
> it so far.
>
> I'll update this thread with whatever I find out.  I'm trying to
> remember the other issues that I ran in to with this limit (beyond the
> whole sort limit, which I do think would be helped by allowing a larger
> value, but it's not as big a deal).

FWIW, I regularly set maintenance_work_mem to 8G for index builds. Presumably that's equivalent to running a sort in a
regularquery with work_mem set that high... 
--
Jim C. Nasby, Database Architect                   jim@nasby.net
512.569.9461 (cell)                         http://jim.nasby.net