Re: a heavy duty operation on an "unused" table kills my server

Greg, I will post more detailed data as soon as I'm able to gather it.

I was trying out if the cancellation of the ALTER cmd worked ok, I might
give the ALTER another try, and see how much CPU, RAM and IO usage gets
involved. I will be doing this monitoring with the process explorer from
sysinternals, but I don't know how I can make it to log the results. Do you
know any tool that you have used that can help me generate this evidence? I
will google a little as soon as possible.

On Wed, Jan 13, 2010 at 3:46 PM, Greg Smith <greg(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> wrote:

> Robert Haas wrote:
>
>> I'm kind of surprised that there are disk I/O subsystems that are so
>> bad that a single thread doing non-stop I/O can take down the whole
>> server. Is that normal? Does it happen on non-Windows operating
>> systems? What kind of hardware should I not buy to make sure this
>> doesn't happen to me?
>>
>>
> You can kill any hardware on any OS with the right abusive client. Create
> a wide table and insert a few million records into it with generate_series
> one day and watch what it does to queries trying to run in parallel with
> that.
>
> I think the missing step here to nail down exactly what's happening on
> Eduardo's system is that he should open up some of the Windows system
> monitoring tools, look at both disk I/O and CPU usage, and then watch what
> changes when the troublesome ALTER TABLE shows up.
>
>
> --
> Greg Smith 2ndQuadrant Baltimore, MD
> PostgreSQL Training, Services and Support
> greg(at)2ndQuadrant(dot)com www.2ndQuadrant.com
>
>