Re: postgres writer process growing up too much

Richard Huxton <dev@archonet.com> writes:
> Heiner Vega wrote:
>> I've been monitoring my postgres processes and I noticed that the resident
>> memory
>> size of the writer process is growing up too much.

> Notice the "SHR"=shared value. That's 155MB virtual memory, 140MB of it
> resident of which 139MB is shared with other processes. So - nothing to
> worry about.

The reason the SHR number grows over time is that the system only counts
a page of shared memory against the process after the process has first
touched it.  Once the bgwriter has touched every page of shared buffers,
the number will stop changing.

If there were actually a memory leak, the VIRT number would be growing
... but it's not.

>> My postgres version is 8.1.3

If I were you, I'd be considerably more worried about the fact that
you are running an old release with a pile of known bugs.

            regards, tom lane