Re: Memory Problem - Mailing list pgsql-admin

If you are working in a 32bit environment you cannot address 4GB per process. Try with 3500000000 for example.

-----Original Message-----
From: Nicolas Michel <nicolas.michel@lemail.be>
To: pgsql-admin@postgresql.org
Subject: [ADMIN] Memory Problem
Date: Fri, 03 Apr 2009 11:35:42 +0200

Hi here,

Our server had 2GB of RAM. We added some memory to have 16GB. We are on a debian etch. I installed the "bigmem" kernel to use the all memory :

~# cat /proc/meminfo
MemTotal:     16573232 kB
MemFree:      15448836 kB
Buffers:        133772 kB
Cached:         445388 kB
SwapCached:          0 kB
Active:         782764 kB
Inactive:       302760 kB
HighTotal:    15794120 kB
HighFree:     14838384 kB
LowTotal:       779112 kB
LowFree:        610452 kB
SwapTotal:     2658716 kB
SwapFree:      2658716 kB
Dirty:             452 kB
Writeback:           4 kB
AnonPages:      506336 kB
Mapped:         126524 kB
Slab:            27620 kB
PageTables:       3036 kB
NFS_Unstable:        0 kB
Bounce:              0 kB
CommitLimit:  10945332 kB
Committed_AS:  2187952 kB
VmallocTotal:   118776 kB
VmallocUsed:      3716 kB
VmallocChunk:   114640 kB

I wanted to give to postgres 4GB. So I tryied to set shmmax to 4Go :

sysctl kernel.shmmax=4294967296

But it doesn't work : if I launch after this modification this command :

sysctl kernel.shmmax

it gives me this response :

kernel.shmmax = 0

Why? Is there a limit to shmmax?