u15074 <u15074(at)hs-harz(dot)de> writes:
> By the way, if you say, checkpointing is happening in the background, I don't
> know what causes the pauses.
Probably insufficient disk bandwidth. If you have two drives available,
try putting the WAL files (pg_xlog directory) on a different drive from
the data files. Assuming you have adequate RAM, updates will be mainly
limited by writes to WAL, while checkpoint doesn't touch WAL and is all
about pushing data from RAM to the data files. So with a proper drive
split, checkpoint really shouldn't affect update rate at all. (It could
affect the time for SELECT queries, if they need to fetch data that
isn't in RAM, but that didn't seem to be your complaint.)
regards, tom lane