I was using the pg_activity monitoring tool, which I find quite awesome. https://github.com/julmon/pg_activity
There are 3 btree indexes, here's the definition of the table itself: Table "audits.audits" Column | Type | Modifiers -------------------+-----------------------------+----------------------------------------------------------------------- id | bigint | not null default nextval('audits.audits_id_seq'::regclass) auditable_type_id | oid | not null auditable_id | integer | operation | audits.operation | not null old_data | jsonb | new_data | jsonb | user_id | integer | default (NULLIF(session.get_var('user_id'::text), ''::text))::integer ip | inet | default (NULLIF(session.get_var('ip'::text), ''::text))::inet service_name | character varying(100) | default NULLIF(session.get_var('service'::text), ''::text) service_action | text | default NULLIF(session.get_var('action'::text), ''::text) created_at | timestamp without time zone | not null default clock_timestamp() Indexes: "audits_pkey" PRIMARY KEY, btree (id) "index_audits_on_auditable_type_id_and_auditable_id" btree (auditable_type_id, auditable_id) "index_audits_on_created_at" btree (created_at) 2016-07-06 19:12 GMT+03:00 Merlin Moncure <mmonc...@gmail.com>: > On Mon, Jul 4, 2016 at 11:35 AM, Kouber Saparev <kou...@gmail.com> wrote: > > I tried to DELETE about 7 million rows at once, and the query went up to > 15% > > of the RAM (120 GB in total), which pushed some indexes out and the > server > > load went up to 250, so I had to kill the query. > > > > The involved table does not have neither foreign keys referring to other > > tables, nor other tables refer to it. The size of the table itself is 19 > GB > > (15% of 120 GB). So why the DELETE tried to put the entire table in > memory, > > or what did it do to take so much memory? > > > > I am using 9.4.5. > > How did you measure memory usage exactly? In particular, memory > consumption from the pid attached to the query or generalized to the > server? Is this linux and if so what memory metric did you use? What > kinds of indexes are on this table (in particular, gin/gist?)? > > merlin >