General Bug Report: Files greater than 1 GB are created while sorting

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POSTGRESQL BUG REPORT TEMPLATE
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Your name : Doug Mitchell
Your email address : doug(at)mitchcraft(dot)com

Category : runtime: back-end
Severity : serious

Summary: Files greater than 1 GB are created while sorting

System Configuration
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Operating System : Linux 2.2.5 ELF (RedHat 6.0)

PostgreSQL version : 6.5

Compiler used : cc version egcs-2.91.66 19990314/Linux (egcs-1.1.2 release)

Hardware:
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PII-300 with 384 MB RAM

Versions of other tools:
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$ rpm -q make flex
make-3.77-6
flex-2.5.4a-6

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Problem Description:
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The backed is creating files bigger than 1 GB when sorting
and it will break when the file gets to 2 GB.

Here are the biggest files:

1049604 -rw------- 1 postgres postgres 1073741824 Jun 30 19:10 bigtable_pkey
1049604 -rw------- 1 postgres postgres 1073741824 Jun 30 19:36 pg_temp.2446.0
1049604 -rw------- 1 postgres postgres 1073741824 Jun 30 19:55 bigtable
1122136 -rw------- 1 postgres postgres 1147937412 Jun 30 21:39 pg_temp2769.3
1148484 -rw------- 1 postgres postgres 1174890288 Jun 30 21:26 pg_temp2769.4

I also have some smaller ".1" files that are the rest of the above
files along with everything else you might expect to find in a
PG database directory. It's those two last big ones that are
troublesome.

Table and indicies are segmenting just fine at 1GB, but
some sort files just keep growing. I did actually get a
back-end error one time when one exceeded 2 GB.

Thanks,
Doug

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Test Case:
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Just do:
mydb=> select * into bigtable2 from bigtable order by custno;

You might want to decrease RELSEGSZ to see it faster.
Mail be back if you can't reproduce it.
(and please make the bug report form boxes bigger!)

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Solution:
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Something is not using the Magnetic Disk Storage Manager,
but is writing a temp file out on its own during the sort.

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