Re: Why is my stats collector so busy?

On Fri, Jun 5, 2009 at 9:38 AM, Bruce Momjian<bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> wrote:
> Laszlo Nagy wrote:
>> On a 8 processor system, my stats collector is always at 100% CPU.
>> Meanwhile disk I/O is very low. We have many databases, they are
>> accessed frequently. Sometimes there are big table updates, but in most
>> of the time only simple queries are ran against the databases, returning
>> a few records only. From the maximum possible 8.0 system load, the
>> average load is always above 1.1 and from this, 1.0 is the stats
>> collector and 0.1 is the remaining of the system. If I restart the
>> postgresql server, then the stats collector uses 0% CPU for about 10
>> minutes, then goes up to 100% again. Is there a way to tell why it is
>> working so much?
>>
>> I asked this problem some months ago on a different mailing list. I was
>> asked to provide tracebacks of the stats collector, but due to a bug in
>> the FreeBSD ppid() function, I'm not able to trace the stats collector.
>
> What version of Postgres are you using?

A little context here. The stats collector is really version
dependent...it gets tweaked just about every version of postgres...it
is more or less unrecognizable since the 8.0 version of postgresql,
where I would simply turn it off and run analyze myself.

Be prepared for the advice to consider upgrading to help deal with
this issue. 8.4 in fact has some enhancements that will help with
situations like this.

merlin