Re: sort_mem param of postgresql.conf

On Thu, Nov 13, 2008 at 7:59 AM, Grzegorz Jaśkiewicz <gryzman(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>
>
> On Wed, Nov 12, 2008 at 11:08 PM, Greg Smith <gsmith(at)gregsmith(dot)com> wrote:
>>
>> Be advised that the work_mem setting (and its deprecated alias sort_mem)
>> are on a per-client basis. So if you have a bunch of people running reports
>> with that setting, you might discover your server running out of memory;
>> that's a really high setting. Generally, if it's only a report or two that
>> need a lot more working memory for sorts, you can do this at the beginning
>> of them instead:
>>
>> set work_mem='512MB';
>
> so how do I change it back to default (without knowing what the previous val
> was). I suppose having it in a transaction won't do :P

default is 1M, but you can safely run 8 to 16 Meg with your setup.