Re: Temp files for simple queries

Default settings might be too low. Try to set work_mem higher. If operations like sorting don't fit into work_mem, temporary files are used.

Hello all,

We have a small Google Cloud SQL PostgreSQL 11 instance.
The instance is configured with 8G of memory and 4 vCPUs, work_mem is 4MB.

I was wondering why the instance uses disk temp files for such a small amount of data (see size in the log below)?

I suppose that it's not only the work_mem limit that could trigger disk temp file creation or the reported SQL statement is not the only one that contributes to it:

I 2021-06-22T09:12:59.164913Z 2021-06-22 09:12:59.163 UTC [1957798]: [2-1] db=<db>,user=<user> STATEMENT: SELECT c1, c2 FROM schema1.t1 WHERE c1 >= $1 ORDER BY c1
I 2021-06-22T09:12:59.164379Z 2021-06-22 09:12:59.163 UTC [1957798]: [1-1] db=<db>,user=<user> LOG: temporary file: path "base/pgsql_tmp/pgsql_tmp1957798.0", size 7380992

The t1 table (table and column names have been masked for privacy) occupies only  440 kB and has 160 records.

Best regards
Dimitre

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Holger Jakobs, Bergisch Gladbach, Tel. +49-178-9759012