Re: Automatically setting work_mem

On Sat, Apr 22, 2006 at 14:20:32 -0700,
  daveg <daveg@sonic.net> wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 22, 2006 at 01:49:25PM -0700, David Fetter wrote:
> > On Sat, Apr 22, 2006 at 01:14:42PM -0700, David Gould wrote:
> >
> > > To avoid running out of swap and triggering the oom killer we have
> > > had to reduce work_mem below what we prefer.
> >
> > Dunno about your work_mem, but you can make sure the OOM killer
> > doesn't kill you as follows <http://lwn.net/Articles/104185/>.
>
> Or I could run with overcommit turned off, but we like overcommit because
> things like vaccuum appear to allocate maint_work_mem when they start, so
> if that is set at say 100 Mb it will allocate 100 Mb even to vacuum a 2
> page table. Overcommit lets this sort of thing get by without createing
> a need for even more swap.

I would expect that you would still come out ahead commiting some disk
space to swap, that will probably never be used, that allows you to better
configure your memory usage.