Re: Postgres eats all memory

On Wed, Aug 13, 2008 at 4:06 AM, Bartels, Eric <e(dot)bartels(at)customsoft(dot)de> wrote:
> Hi there,
>
> we are running a fresh Postgres 8.3 installation with a single
> database with about 80GB of data.
>
> After a while the whole system memory is eaten up and every
> operation becomes very slow. Shortly after a system reboot
> and even without sending queries against the database the
> whole system memory is consumed after some time.

Something is very wrong. As others noted, PostgreSQL stock
configurations use very little memory. This is mainly because the
database relies on the operating system for buffering, less what is in
the very conservatively set shared_buffers.

In short, it is virtually impossible to run a modern computer out of
memory with a stock configuration.

That said, OOM culprits include:

*) C function or 3rd party library leaking
*) massive amounts of sorting going on (on stock config, would take a lot)
*) something else on the box is doing it
*) you have misdiagnosed the problem somehow

merlin