Steven Elliott <selliott4(at)austin(dot)rr(dot)com> writes:
> I don't think the current behavior is particularly harmful, but maybe
> PostgreSQL could be made to idle more quietly.
Yeah, this is something that's on my personal to-do list. It's not
really an efficiency/performance issue, but in a machine that's
otherwise idle this behavior is bad for overall CPU power consumption.
The plan is to try to use the "latch" primitives that were recently
added to the code to eliminate sleep-and-check-for-something-to-do
loops. Didn't get done for 9.1 unfortunately.
regards, tom lane