Re: Random penalties on GIN index updates?

On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 2:35 PM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> Jesper Krogh <jesper@krogh.cc> writes:
>> What I seems to miss a way to make sure som "background" application is
>> the one getting the penalty, so a random user doing a single insert
>> won't get stuck. Is that doable?
>
> You could force a vacuum every so often, but I don't think that will
> help the locking situation.  You really need to back off work_mem ---
> 512MB is probably not a sane global value for that anyway.

Yeah, it's hard to imagine a system where that doesn't threaten all
kinds of other bad results.  I bet setting this to 4MB will make this
problem largely go away.

Arguably we shouldn't be using work_mem to control this particular
behavior, but...

...Robert