So, you’re using londiste and the ticker has not been running all night long, due to some restart glitch in your procedures, and the on call admin didn’t notice the restart failure. If you blindly restart the replication daemon, it will load in memory all those events produced during the night, at once, because you now have only one tick where to put them all.

The following query allows you to count how many events that represents, with the magic tick numbers coming from pgq.subscription in columns sub_last_tick and sub_next_tick.

SELECT count(*) 
  FROM pgq.event_1, 
      (SELECT tick_snapshot
         FROM pgq.tick
        WHERE tick_id BETWEEN 5715138 AND 5715139
      ) as t(snapshots)
WHERE txid_visible_in_snapshot(ev_txid, snapshots);

In our case, this was more than 5 millions and 400 thousands of events. With this many events to care about, if you start londiste, it’ll eat as many memory as needed to have them all around, which might be more that what your system is able to give it. So you want a way to tell londiste not to load all events at once. Here’s how: add the following knob to your .ini configuration file before to restart the londiste daemon:

pgq_lazy_fetch = 500

Now, londiste will lazyly fetch 500 events at once or less, even if a single batch (which contains all events between two ticks) contains a huge number of events. This number seems a good choice as it’s the default PGQ setting of number of events in a single batch. This number is only outgrown when the ticker is not running or when you’re producing more events than that in a single transaction.

Hope you’ll find the tip useful!