From owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG  Wed Jun 29 15:21:47 2005
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To: Sven Willenberger <sven@dmv.com>
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Comments: In-reply-to Sven Willenberger <sven@dmv.com>
	message dated "Wed, 29 Jun 2005 10:28:24 -0400"
Date: Wed, 29 Jun 2005 11:21:41 -0400
Message-ID: <9731.1120058501@sss.pgh.pa.us>
From: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Cc: stable@freebsd.org, pgsql-general@postgresql.org,
	Douglas McNaught <doug@mcnaught.org>
Subject: Re: [GENERAL] PostgreSQL's vacuumdb fails to allocate memory for 
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Sven Willenberger <sven@dmv.com> writes:
> ERROR:  out of memory
> DETAIL:  Failed on request of size 536870910.

That's a server-side failure ...

> Again, if I log in as myself and try to run
> the command vaccumdb -a -z it fails; if I su to root and repeat it works
> fine. I am trying to narrow this down to a PostgreSQL issue vs FreeBSD
> issue.

That's fairly hard to believe, assuming that you are talking to the same
server in both cases (I have seen trouble reports that turned out to be
because the complainant was accidentally using two different servers...)
The ulimit the backend is running under couldn't change depending on
where the client is su'd to.

Is it possible that you've got per-user configuration settings that
affect this, like a different maintenance_mem value for the root user?

			regards, tom lane