Re: inserting huge file into bytea cause out of memory

Hi!
Thanks for all of your interest!
My test PC is Win7 (64-bit), and equipped with 8GB of memory.
In this java project, I configured VM option as:
-D java.security.policy=applet.policy -Xms1280m -Xmx1536m.
And anything needed in the project is in the server descripted above.
I insert

By the way, my project is about migrating Oracle data of BLOB type to
PostgreSQL database. The out of memory error occurred between migrating
Oracle BLOB to PostgreSQL bytea. Another question, if I can't migrate BLOB to bytea,
how about oid type ?

If anybody know about this problem, please write to me.
Thanks in advance !

Liu Yuanyuan
Aug 7, 2013

liuyuanyuan

From: Chris Travers
Date: 2013-08-07 00:49
To: Tomas Vondra
CC: liuyuanyuan; pgsql-general
Subject: Re: [GENERAL] inserting huge file into bytea cause out of memory

On Tue, Aug 6, 2013 at 7:04 AM, Tomas Vondra <tv(at)fuzzy(dot)cz> wrote:

Hi,

On 6 Srpen 2013, 9:12, liuyuanyuan wrote:
Table defination:
create table image_bytea(t_id int, t_image bytea);
Major code:
String sql = "insert into image_bytea(t_id, t_image) values (?, ?)";
ps = conn.prepareStatement(sql);
 ps.setInt(1, 88);
File file = new file("d://1.jpg");
 InputStream in = new BufferedInputStream(new FileInputStream(file));
ps.setBinaryStream(2, in, (int) file.length());
System.out.println("set");
ps.executeUpdate();
Error detail:
org.postgresql.util.PSQLException: Error: out of memory
Details:Failed on request of size 268443660.

Seems like an issue with the OS, not with PostgreSQL, to me.

What OS and HW are you using? How much memory you have and do you have
some user limits in place? For example Linux uses ulimit and some kernel
parameters to limit how much memory can be allocated by a process.

I have noticed a number of bytea/memory issues. This looks like Java, and I am less familiar with that but there are some things that occur to me. There are a few things that make me relatively suspicious of using byteas where the file size is big (lobs are more graceful in those areas IMO because of the fact that you can do seeking and chunking).

On the client side a lot of the difficulties tend to have to do with escaping and unescaping. While I have not done a lot with Java in this area, I have found that Perl drivers sometimes use up to 10x the memory to process the file as the file would take up in binary format. I suspect this has to do with copying the data, escaping it, and passing it on through. For small files this is not an issue but if you are passing 2GB of data in, you had better have a LOT of memory. I wouldn't be surprised if it were similar in Java.

Now, if the front end and back end are on the same server, front-end memory usage is going to count against you. Consequently you are going to have at least the following memory counting against you:

1. The file in binary form
2. The file in escaped form
3. The file in escaped form on the back-end
4. The file in binary form on the back-end.

If hex escaping effectively doubles the size that gives you 6x the memory just for that data. If it is getting copied elsewhere for intermediary usage, it could be significantly more.

So I would start actually by looking at memory utilization on your machine (front and back-end processes if on the same machine!) and see what is going on.

--

Best Wishes,
Chris Travers

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