Perhaps your "work_mem" setting is causing the memory problems. Try reducing it to see if that alleviates the problem.
Regards,
Michael Vitale
I would also lookup the definition of shared buffers and effective cache. If I remember correctly you can think of shared buffers as how much memory total PostgreSQL has to work with. Effective cache is how much memory is available for PostgreSQL to run, shared buffers, as well as an estimate of how much memory is available to the OS to cache files in memory. So effective cache should be equal to or larger than shared buffers. Effective cache is used to help with the SQL planning.
Double check the documentation.
Lance
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