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

[strk at refractions.net]

This doesn't look as a postgis issue, or am I missing
something ? You don't call any postgis function in your
query.

--strk;

On Sun, Jan 15, 2006 at 12:05:35PM -0800, Dustin Moore wrote:
> 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?