Re: Postgres filling up hard drive with swap files

On Aug 20, 2004, at 2:28 PM, Tom Lane wrote:
> I think what you've found is an OS X bug.
>
> I was able to replicate this behavior on OS X 10.3.5.  All I did was
> start the postmaster and then start a continuous loop in a shell
> window:
>     while true
>     do
>         psql -c "select count(*) from tenk1" regression
>     done
> (tenk1 is just a test table with 10000 or so rows ... not very big.)
> After a few thousand iterations I have more swapfiles than I did
> before.
> The postmaster itself is certainly not leaking memory, and there are no
> backends lasting longer than a fraction of a second, but the machine is
> acting like it's got a problem.  Watching top, I see the "free PhysMem"
> steadily decrease to zero and then bounce back up to about 645M (out of
> 768M installed).  Each time it bounces up, the VM pageouts count takes
> a
> jump (otherwise pageouts doesn't move), and there's also a burst of
> disk
> activity according to iostat.  The cycle repeats every 45 seconds or
> so.
> Meanwhile, the entire system has become exceedingly sluggish (opening
> Safari is painful, for example, and even just switching front
> application is visibly slow).

Yes, my system also becomes increasingly sluggish in the manner you
describe as the swap files increase in number and size.

> Time to file a bug report.  With Apple, not with us.

I will. Thanks Tom!