Re: Phantom Command ID

From: Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us>
To: "Jim C(dot) Nasby" <jim(at)nasby(dot)net>
Cc: Heikki Linnakangas <heikki(at)enterprisedb(dot)com>, PostgreSQL-development <pgsql-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org>
Subject: Re: Phantom Command ID
Date: 2006-09-20 20:22:47
Message-ID: 18367.1158783767@sss.pgh.pa.us
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"Jim C. Nasby" <jim(at)nasby(dot)net> writes:
> What would the failure mode be? Would we just keep going until the box
> ran out of memory? I think it'd be better to have some kind of hard
> limit so that a single backend can't grind a production server into a
> swap-storm. (Arguably, not having a limit is exposing a DoS
> vulnerability).

[ shrug... ] If we tried to guarantee such a thing we'd be putting
arbitrary limits into hundreds if not thousands of different bits of the
backend. I think the correct answer for an admin who is worried about
such a thing is to make sure that the process ulimit is a sufficiently
small fraction of the machine's available RAM. Only if we can't
gracefully handle running up against ulimit is it our problem (hence,
we have a stack-size overflow check, but not any such thing for data size).

regards, tom lane

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