Re: Postgres using up all my memory

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.