Re: pg_dump resulting in excessive memory use by postmaster process

* Ben (ben.fyvie@champsoftware.com) wrote:
> is killed off (6GB+ used by a single postmaster process).  Here are the
[...]
> Total number of relations across all schemas: 53,154
[...]
> I should also mention that when performing these dumps there is absolutely
> no other DB activity occurring. Do you have any ideas why the excessive
> memory growth on the postmaster service is occurring when doing a pg_dump?

At first blush, I'm suspicious of the system catalog cache which is
going to want to get every bit of attribute for every relation involved
and it looks like you've got quite a few here.

It seems like something which we could/should improve upon, but I'm not
sure who/what/when/where/how it'll get better.

Still, would it be possible for you to provide a self-contained test
case which shows this, so we can look at what's happening exactly and
verify where the fault lies?

    Thanks,

        Stephen