* Tom Lane (tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us) wrote:
> Stephen Frost <sfrost@snowman.net> writes:
> > Uhh.. I saw that your system was 64-bit, but is your PG process
> > compiled as 64bit? Maybe you're hitting an artificial 32-bit limit,
> > which isn't exactly helped by your shared_buffers being set up so high
> > to begin with? Run 'file' on your postgres binary, like so:
>
> I think it must be compiled 64-bit, or he'd not be able to get
> shared_buffers that high to start with. However, it's possible that the
> postmaster's been started under a ulimit setting that constrains each
> backend to just a few hundred meg of per-process memory.
I'm not so sure.. He has it as '4000MB', which would leave 96M free,
which doesn't seem that far from where his query is ending up at based
on the memory info he provided and the size of the sorts being done.
The ulimit is certainly something else to check tho.
Thanks,
Stephen