Re: Sort causes system to freeze

Craig James wrote:
> Maybe this is an obviously dumb thing to do,

... and it was.  I answered my own question: The problem came from using psql(1) to do something I should have done
withpg_dump. 

> but it looked reasonable to
> me.  The problem is, the seemingly simple sort below causes a fairly
> powerful computer to completely freeze for 5-10 minutes.  During the
> sort, you can't login, you can't use any shell sessions you already have
> open, the Apache server barely works, and even if you do "nice -20 top"
> before you start the sort, the top(1) command comes to a halt while the
> sort is proceeding!  As nearly as I can tell, the sort operation is
> causing a swap storm of some sort -- nothing else in my many years of
> UNIX/Linux experience can cause a "nice -20" process to freeze.
>
> The sort operation never finishes -- it's always killed by the system.
> Once it dies, everything returns to normal.
>
> This is 8.3.0.  (Yes, I'll upgrade soon.)  Is this a known bug, or do I
> have to rewrite this query somehow?  Maybe add indexes to all four
> columns being sorted?
>
> Thanks!
> Craig
>
>
> => explain select * from plus order by supplier_id, compound_id, units,
> price;
>                              QUERY PLAN
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> Sort  (cost=5517200.48..5587870.73 rows=28268100 width=65)
>   Sort Key: supplier_id, compound_id, units, price
>   ->  Seq Scan on plus  (cost=0.00..859211.00 rows=28268100 width=65)
>
> => \d plus       Table "emol_warehouse_1.plus"
>    Column     |     Type      | Modifiers
> ---------------+---------------+-----------
> supplier_id   | integer       | supplier_name | text          |
> compound_id   | text          | amount        | text          |
> units         | text          | price         | numeric(12,2) |
> currency      | text          | description   | text          |
> sku           | text          | Indexes:
>    "i_plus_compound_id" btree (supplier_id, compound_id)
>    "i_plus_supplier_id" btree (supplier_id)
>
>
> max_connections = 1000
> shared_buffers = 2000MB
> work_mem = 256MB
> max_fsm_pages = 1000000
> max_fsm_relations = 5000
> synchronous_commit = off
> #wal_sync_method = fdatasync
> wal_buffers = 256kB
> checkpoint_segments = 30
> effective_cache_size = 4GB
>
> Machine: Dell, 8x64-bit CPUs, 8GB ram, Perc6i battery-backed RAID
> controller, 8 disks as RAID10

Craig