Thanks Tom. I thought the same thing and waded through the archives trying
various fixes such as vacuum, vacuum full (both with analyze), reindex and
still the same issue. However, once the box was rebooted the backup went
smooth and the data was fine. We have two (2) machines (PROD001 & PROD002)
that are "in-sync" and the data matched exactly. PROD002 was where I had
the problem. 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? I would
love to say it's a hardware thing and that postgres is fine

Regards,
Tim

-----Original Message-----
From: Tom Lane [mailto:tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us]
Sent: Friday, May 05, 2006 9:25 AM
To: mcelroy, tim
Cc: pgsql-performance@postgresql.org
Subject: Re: [PERFORM] Memory and/or cache issues?

"mcelroy, tim" <tim.mcelroy@bostonstock.com> writes:
> pg_dump: ERROR: invalid memory alloc request size 18446744073709551613

That looks more like a corrupt-data problem than anything directly to do
with having or not having enough memory.

regards, tom lane

"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

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