Tom,
You are correct. The was an infinate loop created because of the
differences in the date math between Oracle and Postgres.
Thank again for your help.
On Mon, Jan 27, 2014 at 7:43 PM, Tom Lane t...@sss.pgh.pa.us wrote:
Peter Blair petertbl...@gmail.com writes:
Have a problem where a stored procedure is taking a week to run. The
stored procedure should take less than a second to run.
Is that it's known to terminate if you give it a week, or we've let
it run for a week and it shows no sign of ever terminating?
In researching a
select hanging problem, three things are suggested; an autovacuum
problem,
a resource is locked, or there is something wrong with the stored
procedure.
I'd bet on the last, given that you're apparently working with an immature
port from Oracle. The error recovery semantics, in particular, are enough
different in PL/SQL and PL/pgSQL that it's not too hard to credit having
accidentally written an infinite loop via careless translation.
Lastly, in the directories used to store the tables and indexes, there
are
918896 files in the tables directory and 921291 files in the indexes
directory. All of the file names are just numbers (no extensions).
About
60 files are added to each directory every second. On our test systems
and
at our other customer site, there are only about 50 files in each
directory.
Why are there so many files?
If the filenames are just numbers, then they must be actual tables or
indexes, not temp files. (You could cross-check that theory by noting
whether the system catalogs, such as pg_class, are bloating at a
proportional rate.) I'm guessing that there's some loop in your procedure
that's creating new temp tables, or maybe even non-temp tables. You would
not be able to see them via select * from pg_class in another session
because they're not committed yet, but they'd be taking up filesystem
entries. The loop might or might not be dropping the tables again; IIRC
the filesystem entries wouldn't get cleaned up till end of transaction
even if the tables are nominally dropped.
Not much to go on, but I'd look for a loop that includes a CREATE TABLE
and a BEGIN ... EXCEPT block, and take a close look at the conditions
under which the EXCEPT allows the loop to continue.
regards, tom lane
