Tom Lane wrote: > Bruce Momjian <br...@momjian.us> writes: > > Tom Lane wrote: > >> You seem to be confusing one limitation in one code path with the > >> overall meaning of maintenance_work_mem. > > > Oh, OK, so sorts are limited, but not hash sizes? Are there any other > > uses? Should this be documented somehow? What is the actual sort > > limit? > > The particular complaint that's being made here is about tuplesort.c's > array of SortTuples, which isn't all (or even the largest part) of its > memory consumption. The tuples themselves eat significantly more in > nearly all cases. I don't think there's any very easy way to document > what the largest useful maintenance_work_mem for sorting is based on > that --- you'd have to pull a number for tuple size out of the air. > But it's certainly possible to use up lots of gigabytes when sorting > wide tuples. I think the original complaint in this thread was about > building an index, which probably had relatively small tuples so the > SortTuple constraint was more pressing. > > In any case, this is the sort of thing that'd be far better to fix than > document.
Added to TODO: Allow sorts to use more available memory * http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2007-11/msg01026.php * http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2010-09/msg01123.php * http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2011-02/msg01957.php -- Bruce Momjian <br...@momjian.us> http://momjian.us EnterpriseDB http://enterprisedb.com + It's impossible for everything to be true. + -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers