Hannes Dorbath wrote:
> As probably many people I've been running PostgreSQL on Linux with
> default overcommit settings and a lot of swap space for safety, though
> disabling overcommit is recommend according to recent documentation.
>
> PG's memory usage is not exactly predictable, for settings like work_mem
> I always monitored production load and tried to find a safe compromise,
> so that the box under typical load would never go into swap and on the
> other hand users don't need to raise it too often just to get a few OLAP
> queries perform OK.
>
> What I'm trying now is to get a safe configuration for
> vm.overcommit_memory = 2 and if possible run with much less or no swap
> space.
>
What distro / kernel version of linux are you running? We have a
similar issue with late model hardware and RHEL4 recently here at work,
where our workstations are running out of memory. They aren't running
postgresql, they're java dev workstations and it appears to be a RHEL4
on 64 bit problem, so that's why I ask.