"Greg Sabino Mullane" <greg@turnstep.com> writes:
>> What it boils down to is lack of error checking in psql (not the
>> backend).
> What is it about certain boxes that causes the failure, but not on others?
It's a matter of having the out-of-memory condition occur just at the
wrong step, ie, the output from psql's lexical scan (as opposed to the
input, or when trying to construct the Query message to send to the
backend). So it would depend on factors like 32-vs-64-bit and what
you had ulimit set to.
regards, tom lane