Nick <t32(at)2thebatcave(dot)com> wrote:
> I have a production server running postgres 8.3.11. I did a dump
> all and loaded up postgres 9.0.1 on another server. On the new
> server, the postgres autovacuum launcher process eats up an insane
> amount of ram (I have seen 17G virt with 6.5G res).
You're not looking at this in top and adding up the RAM per process,
are you? That is notoriously unreliable; in particular it tends to
count the shared memory over and over. What does free say about
total usage? How do things look with vmstat 1?
> The only change I made in the postgresql.conf (on both versions)
> is setting the maximum number of connections to 1000.
Unless you have four or five hundred cores in the box, that's
probably a bad idea. You should seriously look at using a
connection pool. Search the archives for previous discussions on
that topic.
> So all other options are default to their particular postgres
> versions.
Since the defaults are designed to allow the server to come up on
even a very small machine, you should probably be setting several
more. You might want to start here:
http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Tuning_Your_PostgreSQL_Server
-Kevin