Port Bug Report: Size of postgres process in main memory keeps increasing.

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POSTGRESQL BUG REPORT TEMPLATE
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Your name : Deniz Yuret
Your email address : deniz(at)ai(dot)mit(dot)edu

Category : runtime: back-end
Severity : serious

Summary: Size of postgres process in main memory keeps increasing.

System Configuration
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Operating System : SunOS 5.5.1

PostgreSQL version : 6.3.2

Compiler used : gcc 2.8.1

Hardware:
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Sun Ultra Enterprise 2

Versions of other tools:
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GNU Make version 3.74

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Problem Description:
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I start the postmaster using "postmaster -i". My program
opens a connection to the backend using libpq. The size
of the resulting postgres process seems to increase without
bound.

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Test Case:
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Here is a typical example:
% date
Sun Mar 14 11:40:02 EST 1999
% postmaster -i
% <run program that opens a connection with libpq>
% ps -auxww | grep postgres
USER PID %CPU %MEM SZ RSS TT S START TIME COMMAND
start 1298 0.1 0.1 4536 2288 pts/0 S 11:43:00 0:00 /projects/start/bin/postgres -p -Q -P5 -v 65536 omnibase

;;; after 1 day of operation:

% date
Mon Mar 15 11:09:13 EST 1999
11:08:30/worldbook% ps -auxww
USER PID %CPU %MEM SZ RSS TT S START TIME COMMAND
start 1298 0.5 4.3 90024 88672 pts/0 S 11:43:00 13:49 /projects/start/bin/postgres -p -Q -P5 -v 65536 omnibase

;;; after 2 days of operation

% date
Tue Mar 16 10:03:25 EST 1999
% ps -auxww
USER PID %CPU %MEM SZ RSS TT S START TIME COMMAND
start 1298 0.0 7.8 163040 161688 pts/0 S Mar 14 38:34 /projects/start/bin/postgres -p -Q -P5 -v 65536 omnibase

;;; after 4 days of operation

% date
Thu Mar 18 12:13:08 EST 1999
% ps -auxww
USER PID %CPU %MEM SZ RSS TT S START TIME COMMAND
start 1298 9.4 18.8 390008 388664 pts/0 S Mar 14 189:40 /projects/start/bin/postgres -p -Q -P5 -v 65536 omnibase

;;; after 8 days of operation

% date
Mon Mar 22 10:56:38 EST 1999
% ps -auxww | grep omnibase
start 1298 27.7 24.1 756504 499256 pts/0 S Mar 14 668:58 /projects/start/bin/postgres -p -Q -P5 -v 65536 omnibase

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Solution:
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