My PG server came to a screeching halt yesterday. Looking at top saw a very
large number of "startup waiting" tasks. A pg_dump was running and one of my
scripts had issued a CREATE DATABASE command. It looks like the CREATE DATABASE
was exclusive but was having to wait for the pg_dump to finish, causing a
massive traffic jam of locks behind it.
Once I killed the pg_dump process, things returned to normal.
Version 8.0.12. Is this a bug? It also concerns me because my workload is
likely to expose this problem again.