Re: An out of memory error when doing a vacuum full

Tom,

I will lower the sort_mem and see what happens. :-)

I agree that we probably pushed the limits of a vacuum full with the
size table we had and the large percentage of change in the table. We
did NOT run any vacuum jobs during the update process, that my have
helped to allow the updates to use the reclaimed space in place.

We are going to continue to run into this issue as the table is only
going to get larger and we are still making tweaks. An example would be
adding a new column to the f_pageviews table, we have done this several
times as we discover new data that needs to be captured. This of course
entails an ALTER TABLE ADD COLUMN, then an ALTER TABLE ALTER COLUMN to
set the default, then an update to set the 'historical' rows to the
default value, and finally a SET NOT NULL on the column as none of our
data is allowed to have a value of null. This pretty much entails
updating all the rows in the table.

We are thinking instead of doing an UPDATE it would be better to make a
new temp table, run the code that contains the update logic but instead
of updating the real table write the updated and non updated rows to the
temp table , and then do a drop, rename?

Thanks again for your time.

--sean

p.s.

By the way I am unable to send mail to you directly. I get these
errors: (I assume you just don't want email from earthlink?)

tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us
SMTP error from remote mailer after MAIL FROM:<shannyconsulting(at)earthlink(dot)net>:
host sss.pgh.pa.us [192.204.191.242]: 550 5.0.0 If you would like to talk to me, find a more responsible ISP than earthlink

Tom Lane wrote:

>Sean Shanny <shannyconsulting(at)earthlink(dot)net> writes:
>
>
>>sort_mem = 64000 # min 64, size in KB
>>
>>
>
>You might want to lower that; a complex query could easily use several
>times sort_mem. Whether this is the immediate source of your problem
>with the other query is hard to tell.
>
>
>
>>vacuum_mem = 32767 # min 1024, size in KB
>>
>>
>
>That seems all right, but I recollect now that it only applies to plain
>VACUUM not VACUUM FULL. VACUUM FULL needs to keep track of *all* the
>free space in a table, and so it's certainly possible that vacuuming a
>huge table with many dead tuples could require lots of memory. I can't
>recall anyone else ever complaining about VACUUM FULL running out of
>memory, though, so there may be some other contributing factor in your
>situation. Too bad you reloaded the table --- it would be interesting
>to see if increasing your 512Mb datasize ulimit would have allowed the
>VACUUM FULL to complete. (Not but what it would've taken forever :-()
>
> regards, tom lane
>
>
>