Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Wed, 29 Jun 2005 16:19:01 -0400
From:      Sven Willenberger <sven@dmv.com>
To:        Juergen.Dankoweit@T-Online.de
Cc:        freebsd-stable@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: PostgreSQL's vacuumdb fails to allocate memory for non-root users
Message-ID:  <1120076341.19611.74.camel@lanshark.dmv.com>
In-Reply-To: <1120074873.1720.3.camel@primergy470.juergendankoweit.net>
References:  <1120050088.19603.7.camel@lanshark.dmv.com> <58067976-00C6-4380-90DF-F448D9008C81@khera.org> <1120074873.1720.3.camel@primergy470.juergendankoweit.net>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On Wed, 2005-06-29 at 21:54 +0200, Juergen Dankoweit wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> Am Mittwoch, den 29.06.2005, 14:59 -0400 schrieb Vivek Khera:
> > On Jun 29, 2005, at 9:01 AM, Sven Willenberger wrote:
> > 
> > > Unix user root (and any psql superuser) the vacuum runs fine. It is  
> > > when
> > > the unix user is non-root (e.g. su -l pgsql -c "vacuumdb -a -z") that
> > > this memory error occurs. All users use the "default" class for
> > > login.conf purposes which has not been modified from its installed
> > > settings. Any ideas on how to a) troubleshoot this or b) fix this  
> > > (if it
> > > is something obvious that I just cannot see).
> > 
> > This doesn't make sense: the actual command is executed by the  
> > backend postgres server, so the uid of the client program doens't  
> > make a bit of difference.
> > 
> > You need to see exactly who is generating that error.  It certainly  
> > is not the Pg backend.
> 
> Sorry for that possible stupid question. But why do you think that the
> PG backend does not generate the error?
> I use PostgreSQL since many years under FreeBSD and it is the first time
> to hear from such an error.

As the postgres logfiles have the out of memory error in them it would
appear that it is the backend generating this error. Since, I am
assuming here, dfldsiz and maxdsiz (set in loader.conf at 850MB and 1G
respectively)) are per process, and since I have maintenance work_mem
set at 512M (this all on a 3G box) I am not sure how it fails to
allocate the memory; although top reports only 25-30MB free, there is
some 2.5G in Inactive so there is plenty of memory available. I am
currently running memtest to see if I may have flaky RAM ...

Sven




Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?1120076341.19611.74.camel>