Re: Out of memory error handling in frontend code

> On 28 Sep 2023, at 10:14, Frédéric Yhuel <frederic(dot)yhuel(at)dalibo(dot)com> wrote:

> After some time, we understood that the 20 million of large objects were responsible for the huge memory usage (more than 10 GB) by pg_dump.

This sounds like a known issue [0] which has been reported several times, and
one we should get around to fixing sometime.

> I think a more useful error message would help for such cases.

Knowing that this is case that pops up, I agree that we could do better around
the messaging here.

> I haven't try to get the patch ready for review, I know that the format of the messages isn't right, I'd like to know what do you think of the idea, first.

I don't think adding more details is a bad idea, but it shouldn't require any
knowledge about internals so I think messages like the one below needs to be
reworded to be more helpful.

+ if (loinfo == NULL)
+ {
+ pg_fatal("getLOs: out of memory");
+ }

--
Daniel Gustafsson

[0] https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/7da8823d83a2b66bdd917aa6cb2c5c2619d86011.camel@credativ.de