Re: VACUUM FULL versus CLUSTER ON

On Sat, 2006-07-08 at 10:20, Joshua D. Drake wrote:
> >
> > Unfortunately it would appear that I cannot vacuum full either as I get an
> > out of memory error:
> >
> >
> > # - Memory -
> >
> > shared_buffers = 5000 # min 16, at least max_connections*2, 8KB
> > each work_mem = 131072 # min 64, size in KB
> > maintenance_work_mem = 524288 # min 1024, size in KB
> > max_stack_depth = 4096 # min 100, size in KB
>
> You could decrease your maintenance_work_mem,
>
> But honestly, at this point I would do the backup restore method.

Also, this kind of points out that you might not have enough swap
space. On most database servers there's enough hard drive space laying
about to have as large a swap space as you'd like, and I can't count the
number of times a large swap has given me enough to time to catch
runaway processes and keep an ailing server up and running, albeit
hobbling along, rather than having to worry about running out of virtual
memory.

Unless the memory being allocated here just has to be real memory. But
I'm guessing not. Sure, swapping is slow, but at least it will let some
memory hungry processes finish.