Horton

Thread

  1. Re: BUG #19345: MemoryContextSizeFailure after upgrade 14.11 to 17.7 in stored procedure

    Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> — 2025-12-06T21:04:48Z

    PG Bug reporting form <noreply@postgresql.org> writes:
> After upgrading from PostgreSQL 14.11 to PostgreSQL 17.7 on our production
> environment (RockyLinux8, RPM package), we encountered a crash when
> executing a specific stored procedure.

> This procedure ran successfully in 14.11 (approximately 8 hours execution
> time), but on 17.7 it runs for about 6 hours before failing with:
> LOCATION:  MemoryContextSizeFailure, mcxt.c:1169
> [3717604]BACKTRACE:
>         postgres: postgres003: md pgdb_md 10.21.18.87(53748) CALL()
> [0x50d5e0]
>         postgres: postgres003: md pgdb_md 10.21.18.87(53748) CALL()
> [0x9c96dc]
>         postgres: postgres003: md pgdb_md 10.21.18.87(53748)
> CALL(MemoryContextAllocZero+0x14) [0x9cfb54]
>         postgres: postgres003: md pgdb_md 10.21.18.87(53748)
> CALL(ResourceOwnerEnlarge+0x9f) [0x9d218f]
>         postgres: postgres003: md pgdb_md 10.21.18.87(53748)
> CALL(OpenTemporaryFile+0x64) [0x83dfc4]
>         postgres: postgres003: md pgdb_md 10.21.18.87(53748)
> CALL(BufFileCreateTemp+0x18) [0x83a288]
>         postgres: postgres003: md pgdb_md 10.21.18.87(53748)
> CALL(ExecHashJoinSaveTuple+0x68) [0x6e1ce8]

Hmm.  Apparently, your hash join tried to use so many temporary files
that it needed a more-than-1GB array just to track them all.  One could
guess that it had been in swap hell for some hours before reaching
this point, because that'd imply about a terabyte worth of I/O
buffers, never mind the actual hashtable data.

Too-many-batches (resulting in too-many-temp-files) is a known failure
mechanism for our hash join code.  We've tried to improve that in v18
(cf commits a1b4f289b, aa151022e), but I don't think there's any
appetite for back-patching that work into older branches.

> Observations / Workarounds Tested:
> SET enable_hashjoin = off; → procedure runs successfully.
> SET hash_mem_multiplier = 1; → procedure runs successfully.

I'm curious whether the change of hash_mem_multiplier causes it
to not use a hash join, or that is just successful at limiting
the hash table growth to a point short of failure.

			regards, tom lane