On Fri, Jul 18, 2008 at 9:58 AM, Tom Lane <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > "Gurjeet Singh" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > During these spikes, in the 'top' sessions we see the 'idle' PG > > processes consuming between 2 and 5 % CPU, and since the box has 8 CPUS > (2 > > sockets and each CPU is a quad core Intel Xeon processors) and somewhere > > around 200 Postgres processes, the load spikes to above 200; and it does > > this very sharply. > > This looks like heavy contention for a spinlock. You need to get a > higher-level analysis of what's happening before anyone can say much > more than that. > > Note that 8.1 is pretty much ancient history as far as scalability to > 8-core hardware goes. You should probably consider updating to 8.3 > before investing too much time in tracking down what's happening. > If you can still show the problem on 8.3 then there would be some > interest in fixing it ...
Upgrading is on the cards, but not as high priority as I would like it to be! This is a production box, and we desperatly need some respite from these spikes. Can you please elaborate on what high level diagnosis would you need? I just ran DROP SCHEMA _<slony schema> CASCADE; and it spiked again, on a very low loaded box!! Thanks for all you help. -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] gmail | hotmail | indiatimes | yahoo }.com EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com Mail sent from my BlackLaptop device
