I've been seeing what looks like unbounded memory growth (until the OOM killer
kicks in and kills the postgres process) when running a pl/pgsql function that
performs TRUNCATE statements against various temporary tables in a loop. I
think I've been able to come up with some fairly simple reproductions of the
issue in isolation, but I'm trying to figure out if this is a memory leak or of
I'm perhaps doing something wrong with tuning or other settings.
What I've observed:
- The memory growth occurs if the temp table has indexes or a primary key set
on it.
- Alternatively, the memory growth also occurs if the temp table has certain
column types on it (eg, "text" types).
- If the table doesn't have indexes and only has integer columns present, then
the memory growth does *not* occur.
- I originally saw this against a PostgreSQL 12 server, but I've tested this
against PostgreSQL 9.6.22, 12.7, and 13.3 Docker containers and reproduced it
against all versions in the containers.
Here are 2 separate examples that seem to show the memory growth on the server
(the first being a table with a "text" column, the second example having no
text column but a primary key index):
DO $$
DECLARE
i bigint;
BEGIN
CREATE TEMPORARY TABLE pg_temp.foo (id integer, bar text);
FOR i IN 1..200000000 LOOP
TRUNCATE pg_temp.foo;
END LOOP;
END
$$
DO $$
DECLARE
i bigint;
BEGIN
CREATE TEMPORARY TABLE pg_temp.foo (id integer);
ALTER TABLE pg_temp.foo ADD PRIMARY KEY (id);
FOR i IN 1..200000000 LOOP
TRUNCATE pg_temp.foo;
END LOOP;
END
$$
Compare that to this example (which doesn't have an index or any other column
types that trigger this), which does *not* show any memory growth:
DO $$
DECLARE
i bigint;
BEGIN
CREATE TEMPORARY TABLE pg_temp.foo (id integer);
FOR i IN 1..200000000 LOOP
TRUNCATE pg_temp.foo;
END LOOP;
END
$$
Any help in determining what's going on here (or if there are other ways to go
about this) would be greatly appreciated!
Thank you!
Nick
