Re: problem with lost connection while running long PL/R query

Hi,

Thanks for the help. You have definitely identified the problem, but I
am still looking for a solution that works for me. I tried setting
vm.overcommit_memory=2, but this just made the query crash quicker than
before, though without killing the entire connection to the database. I
imagine that this means that I really am trying to use more memory than
the system can handle?

I am wondering if there is a way to tell postgresql to flush a set of
table lines out to disk so that the memory they are using can be
liberated. Basically, I am creating my table with 8 million lines in 4
chunks, and each chunk fits in memory. As the 4 are inside one query, I
imagine that at some point postgresql tries to put the four together and
write them to disk as a postgresql table, and that is when things
break. Is it possible to tell postgresql to write one "chunk" at a
time? I imagine I could do this using PL/PGSQL and iteration, but
perhaps there is a postgresql configuration parameter that can help with
this?

Thanks again,
David

On 05/16/2013 03:35 PM, Ryan Kelly wrote:
> On Thu, May 05/16/13, 2013 at 02:47:28PM +0200, David M. Kaplan wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I have a query that uses a PL/R function to run a statistical model
>> on data in a postgresql table. The query runs the function 4 times,
>> each of which generates about 2 million lines of results, generating
>> a final table that has about 8 million lines. Each time the
>> function is called, it takes about ~3-5 minutes to finish its work.
>> I know that the function is running fine as it gives me progress and
>> I have had no trouble using it on slightly smaller datasets.
>> However, this time it does the 4 runs, but ends with psql saying the
>> connection to the server has been lost. In the postgresql log file,
>> I have:
>>
>> 2013-05-16 14:05:47 CEST LOG: server process (PID 27488) was terminated by signal 9: Killed
> This usually indicates the OOM killer has killed your backend. Please
> see the documentation here:
>
> http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.2/interactive/kernel-resources.html#LINUX-MEMORY-OVERCOMMIT
>
> -Ryan
>
>

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