Re: BUG #6365: Memory leak in insert and update

Thanks for the quick response. Linux's top fooled me quite a bit.
Excuse me for the false report.

Best regards,
Otto

2011/12/29 Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us>

> havasvolgyi(dot)otto(at)gmail(dot)com writes:
> > The following bug has been logged on the website:
> > Bug reference: 6365
> > Logged by: Otto Havasvölgyi
> > Email address: havasvolgyi(dot)otto(at)gmail(dot)com
> > PostgreSQL version: 9.1.2
> > Operating system: Win XP SP2 x86; Linux Debian 2.6.32 kernel x64
> > Description:
>
> > The bug can be reproduced with pgbench:
>
> I see no memory leak with this example.
>
> I suspect you are being fooled by tools that report shared memory as
> being used by a process only after it first touches a given page of
> shared memory ("top" on Linux does that, for example). This will cause
> the apparent memory consumption of any long-lived backend to increase
> until it has touched every available shared buffer. But that's not a
> leak, just an artifact of the reporting tool. You can confirm for
> yourself that that's what's happening by reducing shared_buffers to
> a few megabytes and observing that reported memory usage increases up
> to that much and then stops growing.
>
> On Linux, I find that watching the "VIRT" column of top output is a
> far more reliable guide to whether a memory leak is actually occuring.
> Can't offer any suggestions as to what to use on Windows.
>
> regards, tom lane
>