Re: high load on server

2009/4/3 Gerd König <koenig(at)transporeon(dot)com>:
> Hello,
>
> since 2 days ago we're facing an increased load on our database server
> (opensuse10.3-64bit, PostgreSQL 8.3.5, 8GB Ram). This high load stays the whole
> working day.

How man cores?

> ==================
> current situation:
> ==================
> #>top
> top - 14:09:46 up 40 days,  8:08,  2 users,  load average: 7.60, 7.46, 7.13
> ...
> Mem:   8194596k total,  5716680k used,  2477916k free,   185516k buffers
> Swap:  4200988k total,      204k used,  4200784k free,  5041448k cached
>
>  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
> 17478 postgres  15   0  610m 455m 444m R   52  5.7   0:08.78 postmaster
> 17449 postgres  15   0  606m 497m 489m S   37  6.2   0:16.35 postmaster
> 22541 postgres  16   0  607m 522m 516m R   31  6.5 123:25.17 postmaster
> 17491 postgres  15   0  618m 447m 435m S   22  5.6   0:03.97 postmaster
> 17454 postgres  15   0  616m 474m 457m S   18  5.9   0:15.88 postmaster
> 22547 postgres  15   0  608m 534m 527m S   18  6.7 100:12.01 postmaster
> 17448 postgres  16   0  616m 517m 501m S   17  6.5   0:15.60 postmaster
> 17451 postgres  15   0  611m 491m 479m S   11  6.1   0:25.04 postmaster
> 17490 postgres  15   0  606m 351m 344m S   10  4.4   0:02.69 postmaster
> 22540 postgres  15   0  607m 520m 513m S    2  6.5  33:46.47 postmaster
> 17489 postgres  15   0  604m 316m 311m S    2  4.0   0:03.34 postmaster

Next time hit c first to see what the postmasters are up to.

> I assume the problem is caused by heavy writing slows down the
> server....?!?...why?=>

The problem might be that you're assuming there's a problem. Looking
at the rest of your diags, you're data set fits in memory, I/O wait is
< 10% and there are no processes waiting for a CPU to free up, they're
all running.

Looks healthy to me.