Tom Lane wrote:
Another thought is to tell people to run the postmaster under a per-process memory ulimit that is conservative enough so that the system can't get into the regime where the OOM killer activates. ulimit actually behaves the way we want, ie, it's polite about telling you you can't have more memory ;-).
That will only work if postgres in the only service running on the machine, though, no? If the postmaster and it's chilren use up 80% of the available memory, then launching a forkbomb will still lead to the postmaster being killed (Since it will get the most points). Or at least this is how I interpret link posted originally. And *if* postgres is the only service, does setting a ulimit have an advantage over disabling memory overcommitting? AFAICS, memory overcommit helps if a program creates 50mb of mosty read-only data, and than forks 10 times, or if it maps a large amount of memory but writes to that block only sparsely. Since postgres does neither, a dedicated postgres server won't see any benefits from overcommitting memory I'd think. regards, Florian Pflug ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 5: don't forget to increase your free space map settings
