Hi all,
I started this discussion in May and was then dragged into other topics, so I
could never follow up. Sorry for that!
Since then, the problem has resurfaced from time to time. Right now, we seem to
have issues again, which gives me the opportunity to follow up on your various
suggestions.
The current error messages are similar to what we have seen before:
<2024-07-25 12:27:38 CEST - > LOG: could not fork autovacuum worker process:
Cannot allocate memory
<2024-07-25 12:27:38 CEST - mailprocessor> ERROR: could not resize shared
memory segment "/PostgreSQL.1226901392" to 189280 bytes: No space left on device
As far as I understand, it does not make much sense to look into SysV shared
memory (which is what ipcs does). Indeed, there is only the same small shared
memory segment as we have seen back then:
# ipcs -m
------ Shared Memory Segments --------
key shmid owner perms bytes nattch status
0x04000194 45 postgres 600 56 20
Francisco and Tom both pointed at Posix shared memory instead; however, this
also does not seem to be used a lot:
# df -h /dev/shm
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
tmpfs 7.8G 6.6M 7.8G 1% /dev/shm
# ls -lhR /dev/shm
/dev/shm:
total 6.6M
-rw------- 1 postgres postgres 1.0M Jul 25 06:26 PostgreSQL.1095217316
-rw------- 1 postgres postgres 1.0M Jul 23 06:20 PostgreSQL.124772332
-rw------- 1 postgres postgres 1.0M Jul 23 06:18 PostgreSQL.1475196260
-rw------- 1 postgres postgres 1.0M Jul 23 06:18 PostgreSQL.1725210234
-rw------- 1 postgres postgres 193K Jul 23 06:15 PostgreSQL.2581015990
-rw------- 1 postgres postgres 193K Jul 23 06:15 PostgreSQL.2929101952
-rw------- 1 postgres postgres 193K Jul 23 06:17 PostgreSQL.3018875836
-rw------- 1 postgres postgres 65K Jul 23 06:15 PostgreSQL.3403523208
-rw------- 1 postgres postgres 193K Jul 23 06:15 PostgreSQL.3482890896
-rw------- 1 postgres postgres 193K Jul 23 06:18 PostgreSQL.3824279998
-rw------- 1 postgres postgres 193K Jul 23 06:18 PostgreSQL.3891977516
-rw------- 1 postgres postgres 193K Jul 23 06:15 PostgreSQL.3929720846
-rw------- 1 postgres postgres 1.0M Jul 23 06:34 PostgreSQL.3969232506
-rw------- 1 postgres postgres 193K Jul 23 06:18 PostgreSQL.4222425006
We also still see a lot of available memory:
# free -m
total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 15882 6966 191 2109 8725 6477
Swap: 1999 271 1728
Again, exactly the same situation as before.
Tom suggested that we hit some kernel limits, but I could not find any related
kernel setting. The only limit I am aware of is the size of the /dev/shm
filesystem itself. This could be changed, but the default value of 8 GB (which
is half of the machine's memory) seems to be enough (given that it is not even
used).
Is there anything else I can analyze? Sorry again for reviving this old thread.
Best,
Christian
PS: The database does not run in a Docker container.
-----Original Message-----
From: Tom Lane <[email protected]>
Sent: Wednesday, May 29, 2024 11:44 PM
To: Christian Schröder <[email protected]>
Cc: Francisco Olarte <[email protected]>;
[email protected]; Eric Wong <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: Memory issues with PostgreSQL 15
[EXTERNAL]
=?utf-8?B?Q2hyaXN0aWFuIFNjaHLDtmRlcg==?= <[email protected]> writes:
> # ipcs -m
> ------ Shared Memory Segments --------
> key shmid owner perms bytes nattch status
> 0x04000194 35 postgres 600 56 19
> I am surprised to see this since I would have expected much more shared
> memory to be used by the database. Is there anything in the configuration
> that prevents the shared memory from being used?
SysV shared memory isn't that relevant to Postgres anymore. Most of what we
allocate goes into POSIX-style shared memory segments, which are not shown by
"ipcs". We do still create one small fixed-size data structure in SysV memory,
which is what you're seeing here, for arcane reasons having to do with the
lifespan of the shared memory segments being different in those two APIs.
>> <2024-05-21 11:34:46 CEST - mailprocessor> ERROR: could not resize
>> shared memory segment "/PostgreSQL.2448337832" to 182656 bytes: No
>> space left on device
This seems to indicate that you're hitting some kernel limit on the amount of
POSIX shared memory. Not sure where to look for that.
regards, tom lane
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