Thread: Postmaster memory problem

Postmaster memory problem

From
"Ricardo J.C.Coelho"
Date:
Hi,

Does anybody use a single query affecting many rows (100,000 or more) ?

I have a table with 500,000 rows. If I update all rows with one query (For
example: update table set field='A';), postmaster will allocate the memory
of the computer (including swap area), until "palloc memory exhauted". The
same thing happens with COPY command. To load this table I splited the text
file in many smaller files.

What did I do wrong during Pgsql compilation ? I'm using RedHat 5.2 (Intel)
and Pgsql 6.4.2

Is there a way to limit the amount of memory used by postmaster ? I tried
ulimit (unix command) and postmaster option but it aborted.

Thanks,

Ricardo Coelho.

Re: [GENERAL] Postmaster memory problem

From
Thomas Reinke
Date:
I regularly do this with tables in access of 1.5 million rows.
E.g. update table set field1='',field2='',field3=''. I have
never run into memory problems. Mind you, I'm using RedHat 4
still, with PostGres 6.3, 128Meg Ram, 90 Meg swap.

"Ricardo J.C.Coelho" wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> Does anybody use a single query affecting many rows (100,000 or more) ?
>
> I have a table with 500,000 rows. If I update all rows with one query (For
> example: update table set field='A';), postmaster will allocate the memory
> of the computer (including swap area), until "palloc memory exhauted". The
> same thing happens with COPY command. To load this table I splited the text
> file in many smaller files.
>
> What did I do wrong during Pgsql compilation ? I'm using RedHat 5.2 (Intel)
> and Pgsql 6.4.2
>
> Is there a way to limit the amount of memory used by postmaster ? I tried
> ulimit (unix command) and postmaster option but it aborted.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Ricardo Coelho.

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