It looks like this effect only occurs in the middle of the night when there is some kind of automated dump process going on and the system is under higher than normal load. I haven't managed to reproduce them outside of production, but since these oddities don't seem to show up during normal operations, I'm not worrying too much about them now.
Thanks Chris On 1 June 2012 14:47, Tom Lane <t...@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote: > Chris Rimmer <chr...@we7.com> writes: > > While investigating some performance issues I have been looking at slow > > queries logged to the postgresql.log file. A strange thing that I have > > seen is a series of apparently very slow queries that just select from a > > sequence. It is as if access to a sequence is blocked for many sessions > and > > then released as I get log entries like this appearing: > > > LOG: duration: 23702.553 ms execute <unnamed>: /* dynamic native SQL > > query */ select nextval ('my_sequence') as nextval > > LOG: duration: 23673.068 ms execute <unnamed>: /* dynamic native SQL > > query */ select nextval ('my_sequence') as nextval > > LOG: duration: 23632.729 ms execute <unnamed>: /* dynamic native SQL > > query */ select nextval ('my_sequence') as nextval > > ....(Many similar lines).... > > That's pretty weird. What else is being done to that sequence? Is it > only the sequence ops that are slow, or does this happen at times when > everything else is slow too? Can you create a reproducible test case? > > regards, tom lane > >