work-mem

I have been researching how to improve my overall performance of
postgres. I am a little confused on the reasoning for how work-mem is
used in the postgresql.conf file. The way I understand the
documentation is you define with work-mem how much memory you want to
allocate per search. Couldn't you run out of memory? This approach
seems kind of odd to me. How do you tell the system not to allocate too
much memory if you all of the sudden got hit with a heavier number of
queries?

Thanks,

Lance Campbell

Project Manager/Software Architect

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University of Illinois

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