memory leak?

Dear All
we have a simple problem: a straight select on one table blows the top
of our 512MB computer. The table has arounf 800000 entries which we
need to dump to a file. We redirect the output to a file in psql
with \o file.extract
which is then follwoed by the select (no joins, or
aggregations). Instead of writing each entry write away to the file,
POSTGRES seems to collect everything in RAM: top shows that Postgres
is getting bigger and bigger. At around 700MB it finally dies - with
an empty file. I dont think that this is a memory leak, instead
it seems to be a 'feature'. When doing a select * it also takes quite
a while before the records get spit out.

Any ideas of what to do?

greetings

Eildert Groeneveld

=========================================
Institute for
Animal Science and Animal Behaviour
Mariensee 31535 Neustadt Germany
Tel : (49)(0)5034 871155
Fax : (49)(0)5034 92579
www : http://www.tzv.fal.de/~eg/
e-mail: eg(at)tzv(dot)fal(dot)de
=========================================