Re: Limit allocated memory per session

On Thu, Oct 1, 2009 at 11:47 AM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> Euler Taveira de Oliveira <euler(at)timbira(dot)com> writes:
>> Tom Lane escreveu:
>>> daveg <daveg(at)sonic(dot)net> writes:
>>>> I'd like to propose adding a new GUC to limit the amount of memory a backend
>>>> can allocate for its own use.
>>>
>>> Use ulimit.
>>>
>> What about plataforms (Windows) that don't have ulimit?
>
> Get a real operating system ;-)
>
> Seriously, the proposed patch introduces overhead into a place that is
> already a known hot spot, in return for not much of anything.  It will
> *not* bound backend memory use very accurately, because there is no way
> to track raw malloc() calls.  And I think that 99% of users will not
> find it useful.

What WOULD be useful is to find a way to provide a way to configure
work_mem per backend rather than per executor node. But that's a much
harder problem.

...Robert