[Bizgres-general] Question: Is 64-bit cache support valuable?

[Luke Lonergan]

Simon, Jim,

>> Also, something that's always irked me is how sorts are handled. The
>> problem is that unless you know your workload really, really well, you
>> can't give large sorts as much memory as they'd like to have without a
>> serious risk of running the system out of memory. Is there something
>> that can be done to put a global limit on sort memory (and possibly
>> other memory uses)? The idea I've proposed in the past is that as each
>> sort consumes or releases memory, it updates a global counter that
>> tracks how much sort memory is in use. As this approaches the set limit,
>> sorts would be allowed to allocate less memory. Ultimately, the idea is
>> to do everything possible to allow sorts that can fit entirely in memory
>> to do so, while forcing sorts that obviously can't fit in memory to
>> disk. So, like buffer management, how hard would it be to have
>> different/additional sort memory management from the base postgresql
>> code?
> 
> Almost exactly what I had in mind. Spooky, but good. I'll not discuss
> the full design just yet, but it has the features you mention, plus some
> extra control features.

Excellent!  We've been discussing same internally.  We'll await your
findings.

- Luke