It appears to me that work_mem is a more significant configuration option than previously assumed by many PostgreSQL users, myself included. As with many database optimizations, it's an obscure problem to diagnose because you generally only observe it through I/O activity.

One possibility would be to log a warning whenever work_mem is exceeded (or exceeded by a certain ratio). I would also love a couple of new statistics counters tracking the amount of work memory used and the amount of work memory that has spilled over into pgsql_tmp.

Alexander.

On Oct 5, 2006, at 10:48 , Peter Bauer wrote:

Hi all,

inspired by the last posting "Weird disk write load caused by
PostgreSQL?" i increased the work_mem from 1 to 7MB and did some
loadtest with vacuum every 10 minutes. The system load (harddisk) went
down and everything was very stable at 80% idle for nearly 24 hours!
I am currently performing some pgbench runs to evaluate the hardware
and configuration for the system but i think the biggest problems are
solved so far.

thx everybody,
Peter

2006/10/2, Tom Lane <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
Ray Stell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> How would one determine the lock situation definitively?  Is there
> an internal mechanism that can be queried?

pg_locks view.

                        regards, tom lane

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