On 5/20/11 4:25 PM, Scott Marlowe wrote:
On Fri, May 20, 2011 at 3:14 PM, Craig James<craig_ja...@emolecules.com>  wrote:
Our development server (PG 8.4.4 on Ubuntu server) is constantly doing
something, and I can't figure out what.  The two production servers, which
are essentially identical, don't show these symptoms.  In a nutshell, it's
showing 10K blocks per second of data going out, all the time, and
essentially zero blocks per second of input.
After a lot of digging around, I found this in the /postgres/pg_stat_tmp
directory.  If I list the directory including the i-nodes once every second,
I find that a new 2MB file is being created roughly once every two seconds:
Have you got a lot of databases in your development environment?  I
think that can sometimes cause a lot of pg_stat writes.
Yes.  The production servers have a dozen or so databases, but the development server has 
a couple hundred databases. Does that count as "a lot of databases"?

We've had even more databases in the past (>500) and didn't see this sort of 
I/O activity.

The odd thing is that this activity is gradually growing, so slowly that you don't notice 
it right away.  A month or two ago, nothing.  A couple weeks ago, a constant stream of 
"grass" in xload's graph.  Today, xload is showing a 50% all the time.  I can 
only guess that the load will continue to increase.

Is there a way to tell Postgres not to do this, or to do it less?  It's not a 
big disaster (yet), but it's annoying to have the system spewing a couple 
megabytes of pg_stat_tmp data every few seconds.

Thanks,
Craig

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