Re: configurability of OOM killer

On Mon, Feb 04, 2008 at 08:46:26PM +0000, Simon Riggs wrote:
> On Mon, 2008-02-04 at 15:31 -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
>
> > I cannot see any way of restricting global memory
> > consumption that won't hurt performance and flexibility.
>
> We've discussed particular ways of doing this previously and not got
> very far, its true. I think we need to separate problem identification
> from problem resolution, so we can get past the first stage and look for
> solutions.
>
> This is my longest running outstanding problem with managing Postgres on
> operational systems.
>
> Sure, OOM killer sucks. So there's two problems, not one.

Yes, this problem goes way beyond OOM. Just try and configure
work_memory aggressively on a server that might see 50 database
connections, and do it in such a way that you won't swap. Good luck.

We really do need a way to limit how much memory we will use in total.
--
Decibel!, aka Jim C. Nasby, Database Architect  decibel@decibel.org
Give your computer some brain candy! www.distributed.net Team #1828