Re: Out of Memory - 8.2.4

On Aug 24, 2007, at 11:46 AM, Tom Lane wrote:

> Jeff Amiel <becauseimjeff(at)yahoo(dot)com> writes:
>> Aug 22 18:08:24 db-1 postgres[16452]: [ID 748848
>> local0.warning] [6-1] 2007-08-22 18:08:24 CDT ERROR:
>> out of memory.
>> Aug 22 18:08:24 db-1 postgres[16452]: [ID 748848
>> local0.warning] [6-2] 2007-08-22 18:08:24 CDT
>> DETAIL: Failed on request of size 536870910.
>
>> What I found interesting is that It's ALWAYS the same
>> size....536870910
>
>> maintenance_work_mem = 512MB # min 1MB
>
> Apparently this maintenance_work_mem setting is higher than your
> system
> can reliably provide. Knock it back a bit.
>
> regards, tom lane

I'm not so sure. In my case, the request size was only 256MB and we
maintain about 10 - 11 GB free of our 16 GB of memory (2GB
shared_buffers, 42MB work_mem, and 256 MB maintenance_work_mem). The
toast table that was involved in the error was pretty small and I was
able to successfully vacuum it myself virtually instantly. However,
in my case, this (so far) being a one time error I don't have much
more data to contribute. We constantly monitor and graph our
system's I/O, CPU, and memory usage and scan our logs for errors so
if anything else comes up I'll be sure to share.

Erik Jones

Software Developer | Emma®
erik(at)myemma(dot)com
800.595.4401 or 615.292.5888
615.292.0777 (fax)

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