Re: VACUUM FULL memory requirements

David Schnur <dnschnur@gmail.com> wrote:

> I have a weekly task set up to VACUUM FULL a fairly large (~300M
> row ~50GB) database.

I hope you've been following that with a REINDEX every time;
otherwise you're causing index bloat.

> The intent is to free up disk space from especially-large inserts
> that aren't covered by the regular reclamation from a daily
> VACUUM.

Are these inserts happening in the same table(s) each time?  If so,
what are you gaining by moving the space from the database's free
space manager to the file system's free space management (and back
again) each time?

>  Recently, I've been getting the following error:
>
> (OperationalError) out of memory
> DETAIL:  Failed on request of size 330.

You might want to reduce maintenance_work_mem.  See this thread:

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-performance/2009-12/msg00120.php

-Kevin