Subject: Shared Memory
From: Holger Amann <keeney@fehu.org>
Date: Tue, 27 Oct 2009 00:15:25 +0100

Hi!

We have a Debian guest running on a Debian Host (linux-image-2.6.26-1- 
vserver-amd64, util-vserver  0.30.216~r2772-6) for our Postgres 8.4  
database. After a period of time, Postgres got killed

[27795665.838308] VM: killing process postgres

This is reproducable, if we open a few connections and execute a large  
query on each of them, sequential. The guests "top" (VIRT_MEM) showed  
us, that after an executed query on a connection (process), the  
available memory decreases with the amount of postgres' shmem setting  
( "shared_buffer_size", shared memory) until swap got filled. The  
settings for Postgres are ok, it never comes to that situation on a  
_real_ server with an equal configuration  (available Ram, equal  
database content, equal configuration and so on). What could lead to  
that wrong behaviour?

Thanks in advance

Holger