Re: two memory-consuming postgres processes

On Fri, 2 May 2008, Alexy Khrabrov wrote:

> I created several indices for the primary table, yes.

That may be part of your problem.  All of the indexes all are being 
updated along with the main data in the row each time you touch a record. 
There's some optimization there in 8.3 but it doesn't make index overhead 
go away completely.  As mentioned already, the optimal solution to 
problems in this area is to adjust table normalization as much as feasible 
to limit what you're updating.

> Basically, the derived data is not critical at all, -- can I turn (1) 
> off transactional behavior for an UPDATE,

What you can do is defer transaction commits to only happen periodically 
rather than all the time by turning off syncronous_commit and increasing 
wal_writer_delay; see 
http://www.postgresql.com.cn/docs/8.3/static/wal-async-commit.html

> (2) should I care about vacuuming being done on the fly when saving RAM, 
> or need I defer it/manage it manually?

It's hard to speculate from here about what optimal vacuum behavior will 
be.  You might find it more efficient to turn autovacuum off when doing 
these large updates.  The flip side is that you'll be guaranteed to end up 
with more dead rows in the table and that has its own impact later.

--
* Greg Smith gsmith@gregsmith.com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD