Re: Restoring large tables with COPY

Marko Kreen <marko(at)l-t(dot)ee> writes:
> Maybe I am missing something obvious, but I am unable to load
> larger tables (~300k rows) with COPY command that pg_dump by
> default produces.

I'd like to find out what the problem is, rather than work around it
with such an ugly hack.

> 1) Too few WAL files.
> - well, increase the wal_files (eg to 32),

What PG version are you running? 7.1.3 or later should not have a
problem with WAL file growth.

> 2) Machine runs out of swap, PostgreSQL seems to keep whole TX
> in memory.

That should not happen either. Could we see the full schema of the
table you are having trouble with?

> Or shortly: during pg_restore the resource requirements are
> order of magnitude higher than during pg_dump,

We found some client-side memory leaks in pg_restore recently; is that
what you're talking about?

regards, tom lane