Re: [HACKERS] Vacuum: allow usage of more than 1GB of work mem

On Tue, Apr 11, 2017 at 3:53 PM, Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> wrote:
> 1TB / 8kB per page * 60 tuples/page * 20% * 6 bytes/tuple = 9216MB of
> maintenance_work_mem
>
> So we'll allocate 128MB+256MB+512MB+1GB+2GB+4GB which won't be quite
> enough so we'll allocate another 8GB, for a total of 16256MB, but more
> than three-quarters of that last allocation ends up being wasted.
> I've been told on this list before that doubling is the one true way
> of increasing the size of an allocated chunk of memory, but I'm still
> a bit unconvinced.

There you're wrong. The allocation is capped to 1GB, so wastage has an
upper bound of 1GB.