Hi, Steinar, Steinar H. Gunderson wrote: > On Wed, Nov 22, 2006 at 11:17:23AM +0100, Markus Schaber wrote: >> The Backend allocates gigs of memory (we've set sort_mem to 1 gig), and >> then starts spilling out more Gigs of temporary data to the disk. > > How much RAM is in the server? Remember that sort_mem is _per sort_, so if > you have multiple sorts, it might allocate several multiples of the amount > you set up.
That one machine has 16 Gigs of ram, and about 10 Gigs tend to be "free" / part of the Linux blocklayer cache. The temporary data is not swapping, it's the Postgres on-disk sort algorithm. HTH, Markus -- Markus Schaber | Logical Tracking&Tracing International AG Dipl. Inf. | Software Development GIS Fight against software patents in Europe! www.ffii.org www.nosoftwarepatents.org ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 5: don't forget to increase your free space map settings
