Michael Richards <miker@scifair.acadiau.ca> writes:
> I am not running out of swap space either...
> under top the backend just keeps growing.
> 492 postgres 85 0 16980K 19076K RUN 1:43 91.67% 91.48% postgres
> when it hit about 20 megs, it craps out.
Sounds to me like you are hitting a kernel-imposed limit on process
memory size. This should be reconfigurable; check your kernel parameter
settings. You'll probably find it's set to 20Mb ... or possibly 16Mb
for data space, or some such. Set it to some more realistic fraction
of your available swap space.
In the longer term, however, it's disturbing that vacuum evidently needs
space proportional to the table size. Can anything be done about that?
Someday I might want to have huge tables under Postgres...
regards, tom lane