RE: attempting to retrieve column names from information schema fails.

Thank you Tom.

I'll log that suggestion with our internal trouble report for actions to take on it's next occurrence.
I should have thought of using your suggested view. It's been some time since I have had any
suspicious postgresql behavior to explore and had forgotten about some of the better power tools.
Admin skills get rusty.

Best

Dave

-----Original Message-----
From: Tom Lane [mailto:tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us]
Sent: Monday, December 04, 2017 11:08 AM
To: Day, David <dday(at)redcom(dot)com>
Cc: pgsql-general(at)postgresql(dot)org
Subject: Re: attempting to retrieve column names from information schema fails.

"Day, David" <dday(at)redcom(dot)com> writes:
> I'm looking on some insights on the following problem on retrieving
> table column names from the information schema ( postgres 9.6.6 FreeBSD 11.1 ) When my client starts up up. Each thread ( 10 ) run this command.
> select column_name from information_schema.columns where table_name =
> 'pep_port_log'; I have encountered two instances of testing Where the server does not respond to that command.

Hm. Next time it happens, look into pg_stat_activity to see if the backend process is waiting, and if so for what, and what other processes are waiting. (I'm wondering about undetected deadlocks, for instance.) If it's running, maybe you could collect some stack traces to try to narrow down what it's doing. Actually, a stack trace would be useful if it's waiting, too.

https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Getting_a_stack_trace_of_a_running_PostgreSQL_backend_on_Linux/BSD

regards, tom lane