Re: changing sort_mem on the fly?

Tom Lane wrote:
> The correct place for a sysadmin to limit memory usage would be in the
> ulimit settings the postmaster starts under.  Of course, Neil's argument
> still holds in general: anyone who can write arbitrary queries is not
> going to have any difficulty in soaking up unreasonable amounts of
> resources.  Trying to restrict that would probably make the system less
> useful rather than more so.

I'm not sure if I agree that there's no potential for implementing
better resource limits/quotas in PG in the future, I was just pointing
out that it would require a lot more work to prevent resource
consumption by malicious users than merely limiting who is allowed to
set sort_mem/work_mem. If you could implement per-user/per-connection
limits on things like processor usage or disk space consumption, I think
that would be useful to some users (e.g. people offering PG in a web
hosting environment).

-Neil