Re: [GENERAL] shared_buffers Question

[Joe Lester]

Thanks for the suggestion Scott. I did a...

find / -type f -size +100000 -print

The results contained 9 Gig! of swap files:
/private/var/vm/swapfile0
/private/var/vm/swapfile1
/private/var/vm/swapfile10
.... [plus many more entries]

That seems to indicate to me a memory "leak" of some sort. My symptoms mirror almost exactly those of this fellow, who's thread was never resolved as far as I can see:

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-bugs/2004-06/msg00013.php

Anyone have any other suggestions on what to look for? At this rate I'm leaking about 2 to 4 Gigs of memory (swap) per week. I'm running postgres 7.4.1 on an 700MHz eMac, 512MB RAM, OS 10.3.2. Thanks.

> Scott Ribe:
> Also check to make sure that some rogue process somewhere isn't filling your
> hard disk with some huge log file. I don't remember the UNIX commands
> offhand, but you should sudo a search starting in / for all large files, say

Joe's Original Message:
I've been running a postgres server on a Mac (10.3, 512MB RAM) with 200 clients connecting for about 2 months without a crash. However just yesterday the database and all the clients hung. When I looked at the Mac I'm using as the postgres server it had a window up that said that there was no more disk space available to write memory too. I ended up having to restart the whole machine. I would like to configure postgres so that is does not rely so heavily on disk-based memory but, rather, tries to stay within the scope of the 512MB of physical memory in the Mac.