In response to Matthew Wakeling <matthew@flymine.org>:
>
> Hi. I have a problem on one of our production servers. A fairly
> complicated query is running, and the backend process is using 30 GB of
> RAM. The machine only has 32GB, and is understandably swapping like crazy.
> My colleague is creating swap files as quickly as it can use them up.
>
> The work_mem setting on this machine is 1000MB, running Postgres 8.3.0.
If your query it dealing with a lot of data, it could easily use 1G per
sort operation. If there are a lot of sorts (more than 32) you'll end
up with this problem.
1G is probably too much memory to allocate for work_mem.
--
Bill Moran
Collaborative Fusion Inc.
http://people.collaborativefusion.com/~wmoran/
wmoran@collaborativefusion.com
Phone: 412-422-3463x4023
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