[postgis-users] Always loosing my data to "invalid memory alloc request size"

[Dustin Moore]

I'm about a week into my experience with PostGIS, but I'm an old hand at
MySQL.  I have a table 'frame' that has about 1.3 million entries:

                                         Table "public.frame"
      Column     |          Type          |                        Modifiers
----------------+------------------------+----------------------------------------------------------
  frame_id       | bigint                 | not null default nextval('frame_frame_id_seq'::regclass)
  frame_file     | character varying(512) | not null
  frame_number   | integer                | not null
  frame_rand     | integer                |
  frame_loc      | geometry               | not null
  frame_route_id | bigint                 |
Indexes:
     "frame_pkey" PRIMARY KEY, btree (frame_id)
     "frame_file_index" btree (frame_file)
     "index_frame_loc" gist (frame_loc) CLUSTER
Check constraints:
     "enforce_dims_frame_loc" CHECK (ndims(frame_loc) = 2)
     "enforce_geotype_frame_loc" CHECK (geometrytype(frame_loc) = 'POINT'::text OR frame_loc IS NULL)
     "enforce_srid_frame_loc" CHECK (srid(frame_loc) = 4326)


It seems that everytime I do a large update I corrupt the database and loose everything.
In particular, a command like this:
update frame set frame_route_id = route_id from route where frame_file=route_file;
	[route being a simple table with a btree indexe on route_file]

I get errors like "ERROR:  invalid memory alloc request size 1671807492" and these
errors won't go away. If I then attempt to pg_dump -Fc it will fail with the same error. So
basically, the data is gone (or at least I can't recover it in its entirety).

I'm running Postgis 1.1.0 on Postgresql 8.2.1 with Geos and Proj on Debian stable.
I compiled Postresql from scratch. I've also had the same problem with Postgis 1.0.6.
My swap file size is 3GB. Are there some memory  or buffer settings I should be messing with?

Based on the mailing list traffic, I see people that have had similar trouble using
geos functions but I'm not using any geos functions in the queries that initially
fail and corrupt the database.

Is there a tested "stable" configuration of Postgis and Postgresql that can handle a
table with 100 million rows?