Re: strange pauses

Adrian Moisey wrote:
> Hi
>
>>>> If I tail the logs, I see a steady stream of functions that took longer
>>>> then 5 seconds. But every now and then I see nothing for 3 minutes and
>>>> after that a whole bunch (about 20 - 30) queries all finishing at the
>>>> same second.
>>>
>>> Search this list for references to "checkpoints". If you run
>>> vmstat/iostat for a bit you should see bursts of disk activity at those
>>> times.
>>>
>>> Counter-intuitively you probably want *more* checkpoints (with less data
>>> to write out each time), but see the list archives for discussion. Also
>>> check the manuals for some background info.
>>
>> We use a lot of checkpoints in our database, we don't care about these
>
> We use a lot of temporary tables in our database, sorry.
>
>> much. We think this is causing the checkpoint to write a lot of data at
>> checkpoint time. Can we stop this behavior ?

No, data written in temp tables do not cause extra I/O on checkpoint.
Catalog changes due to temp table creation could, but I doubt that's the
problem.

Perhaps, if you want to avoid I/O caused by temp tables (but it's not at
checkpoint time, so perhaps this has nothing to do with your problem),
you could try raising temp_buffers.

--
Alvaro Herrera http://www.CommandPrompt.com/
PostgreSQL Replication, Consulting, Custom Development, 24x7 support