Bug #792: pg_dump uses all available RAM and swap

Steve Riley (stepa(at)openskysoftware(dot)com) reports a bug with a severity of 2
The lower the number the more severe it is.

Short Description
pg_dump uses all available RAM and swap

Long Description
We noticed that doing a pg_dump was taking longer and longer to perform when doing data backup. For this and other reasons, we began doing backup by stopping the server and tarring the data directory. Now, we are trying to upgrade to 7.2.1 and we find that we must do a pg_dump of our data to restore properly, but running pg_dump now causes all available resources to be used up with no output until the system locks up.

We run postgresql 7.1 on RedHat Linux 7.3

The total size of the data directory is 38 Mb

Command is: pg_dump buildit > buildit.pgdump

Memory monitor begins to fill up, then swap use begins to fill up, then if not halted by hand, the system locks up.

Sample Code

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