Re: worker took too long to start; cancelled

Robert Fitzpatrick wrote:

> After getting it back up, I find this in the logs...
>
> Nov 4 08:09:50 esmtp postgres[769]: [6-1] WARNING: worker took too
> long to start; cancelled
>
> I have this every minute prior to the crash about 5 or 6 times.

This means that an autovacuum worker could not start in a certain period
of time. I've seen this happen under heavy load. It is not a fatal
problem; it only means one autovacuum round was not completed.

If your system is seeing this problem all the time (as opposed to only
when the system is so heavily loaded that it's about to crash) then you
should probably throw more hardware at it. Otherwise it's ignorable.
(Maybe we should improve the error message to make it less scary.)

> I did not find any errors isolated to this time period, but I do see
> the following throughout those logs...
>
> ERROR: deadlock detected

This is unrelated.

--
Alvaro Herrera http://www.CommandPrompt.com/
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