On Feb 14, 2004, at 9:02 PM, Marinos J. Yannikos wrote:
Josh Berkus wrote:
800MB for sort mem? Are you sure you typed that correctly? You must be counting on not having a lot of concurrent queries. It sure will speed up index updating, though!
800MB is correct, yes... There are usually only 10-30 postgres processes active (imagine 5-10 people working on the web front-end while cron jobs access the db occasionally). Very few queries can use such large amounts of memory for sorting, but they do exist.
Remember that it is going to allocate 800MB per sort. It is not "you can allocate up to 800MB, so if you need 1 meg, use one meg". Some queries may end up having a few sort steps.
In terms of sort mem it is best to set a system default to a nice good value for most queries. and then in your reporting queries or other ones set sort_mem for that session (set sort_mem = 800000) then only that session will use the looney sort_mem
It would be interesting to know if your machine is swapping. -- Jeff Trout <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.jefftrout.com/ http://www.stuarthamm.net/
---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 8: explain analyze is your friend
