Kurt Overberg <kurt@hotdogrecords.com> writes:
> main question:
> During a large select/insert like this, the memory use of the pgsql
> backend goes up, right?
No, it's not supposed to go up in the first place. When I run what
I think is the same case, I don't see the backend's resident-set-size
going above a couple meg. You seem to be suffering an internal memory
leak, which is not a very surprising kind of bug --- but I don't
understand why I can't duplicate it.
Let's see ... what locale and encoding are you using? Maybe it depends
on that.
regards, tom lane