Re: pg_dump and server responsiveness

"Bryan Murphy" <bryan(dot)murphy(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> It does appear to be lock contention. I took a closer look this
> morning, and I noticed our web site was consistently locking up on a
> particular table, and there were a number of exclusive locks. I
> started eliminating various jobs, and found the one that essentially
> rewrites that particular table every 5 minutes to be the culprit
> (create new table, drop old table, rename new table).

> Is there a better way we can do this so that we won't causes lock
> contention during a dump?

Why dump such a table at all? It evidently doesn't contain any
data you need to preserve ...

I forget which version you are running, but 8.2 pg_dump has an
--exclude-table switch which'd work peachy for this.

regards, tom lane