Citus Blog

work_mem is perhaps the most confusing setting within Postgres. work_mem is a configuration within Postgres that determines how much memory can be used during certain operations. At its surface, the work_mem setting seems simple: after all, work_mem just specifies the amount of memory available to be used by internal sort operations and hash tables before writing data to disk. And yet, leaving work_mem unconfigured can bring on a host of issues. What perhaps is more troubling, though, is when you receive an out of memory error on your database and you jump in to tune work_mem, only for it to behave in an un-intuitive manner.