Contents
- 1 How to know if PostgreSQL process has high memory utilization?
- 2 What happens when Postgres grabs a block of memory?
- 3 How is shared memory allocated in PostgreSQL server?
- 4 What is local memory used for in PostgreSQL?
- 5 What should the shared buffer be in PostgreSQL?
- 6 Why does PostgreSQL keep hash table in memory?
How to know if PostgreSQL process has high memory utilization?
If you know that the PostgreSQL process is having a high memory utilization, but the logs didn’t help, you have another tool that can be useful here, pg_top. This tool is similar to the top linux tool, but it’s specifically for PostgreSQL.
What happens when Postgres grabs a block of memory?
At the same time, Postgres grabs takes that block from the kernel, and also caches it. Now, that block is redundantly cached. If the kernel find a better use for that block of cache memory, it will flush it out the Postgres block, and load the new one. Meanwhile, Postgres will retain that block in its internal cache.
Shared Memory: It is allocated by the PostgreSQL server when it is started, and it is used by all the processes. It is divided into sub-areas:
How to know if PostgreSQL is responsible for this issue?
When you confirm that PostgreSQL is responsible for this issue, the next step is to check why. Checking both the PostgreSQL and systems logs is definitely a good way to have more information about what is happening in your database/system. You could see messages like: ? If you don’t have enough free memory.
What does the PostgreSQL table mean for database sessions?
PostgreSQL table contains a lot of useful information about database sessions. backend_start – time when this process was started. For client backends, this is the time the client connected to the server. state – current overall state of this backend.
What is local memory used for in PostgreSQL?
Local Memory: It is loaded by each backend process for its own use for queries processing. It is divided into sub-areas: Work mem: The work mem is used for sorting tuples by ORDER BY and DISTINCT operations, and for joining tables.
According to the documentation, if you have a dedicated database server with 1GB or more of RAM, a reasonable starting value for shared_buffers is 25% of the memory in your system. It specifies the amount of memory that will be used by the ORDER BY, DISTINCT and JOIN before writing to the temporary files on disk.
Why does PostgreSQL keep hash table in memory?
General Performance PostgreSQL has following behavior until version 13: “Previously, hash aggregation was avoided if it was expected to use more than work_mem memory. […] once hash aggregation had been chosen, the hash table would be kept in memory no matter how large it got — which could be very large if the planner had misestimated “.