Are you saying the kernel's disc cache may be getting whacked? No, I understand that PG should use as much memory as it can and the system as well. The main problem here is that with almost all the 8GB of RAM 'in use' when I try to do a pg_dump or vacuumdb I run out of memory and the system crashes....
I well understand that unused memory is not a good thing, just that when you have none and can't do the maint work....bad stuff happens. For example, I just created a benchdb on my DEV box with 1,000,000 tuples. As this ran the mem in use jumped up 1G and it hasn't gone down? Once the PG process has finished its task shouldn't it release the memory it used?
Thanks,
Tim
-----Original Message-----
From: Tom Lane [mailto:tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us]
Sent: Friday, May 05, 2006 9:44 AM
To: mcelroy, tim
Cc: pgsql-performance@postgresql.org
Subject: Re: [PERFORM] Memory and/or cache issues?
"mcelroy, tim" <tim.mcelroy@bostonstock.com> writes:
> I see this on all the postgres installations, no matter what I
> set the postgresql.conf settings to regarding memory allocation, once
> postgres starts up 95% of the memory on the box is used. Is there a way
> within Linux to 'see' what or who is actually using this memory?
Probably kernel disk cache. Are you under the misimpression that unused
memory is a good thing? If a Unix-ish system *isn't* showing near zero
free memory under load, the kernel is wasting valuable resources.
regards, tom lane