[GENERAL] copy a large table raises out of memory exception

From: A. Ozen Akyurek <ozen(at)ventura.com.tr>
Date: Mon Dec 10 2007 - 04:19:05 EST

We have a large table (about 9,000,000 rows and total size is about 2.8 GB) which is exported to a binary file. Postgre 8.2 is running on a Windows 2003 Small business Server which has a 2 GB RAM. When we run "copy tablename from filepath" command, memory usage increases up to 1.8 GB and postgre raises exception "out of memory". If we copy a small part of the table (e.g 1,000,000 rows) everything works fine.

As far as I understand, postgre is trying to load all the rows into RAM before writing it to the database. I tried running postgre with several different configuration parameters but the result is same. Did anybody face a similar problem?

Kind regards
A. Ozen Akyurek

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