Bryce Nesbitt <bryce1(at)obviously(dot)com> writes:
> update event set reconciled=true where event_id in
> (select event_id from event join token using (token_number)
> where token_status=50 and reconciled=false LIMIT 1);
> On a 4 CPU machine, 2 CPU's peg at 100%, and the request just eats CPU
> forever.
What does EXPLAIN show for this and for the base query?
> PostgreSQL 7.4.1 on i686-pc-linux-gnu, compiled by GCC gcc (GCC) 3.2.3
This may be your problem right here. You are urgently in need of an
update in any case --- there are a lot of nasty bugs fixed since 7.4.1:
http://developer.postgresql.org/docs/postgres/release.html
regards, tom lane