big select is resulting in a large amount of disk writing by kjournald

I just installed a shiny new database server with pg 8.4.1 running on
CentOS 5.4. After using slony to replicate over my database I decided to
do some basic performance tests to see how spiffy my shiny new server
is. This machine has 32G ram, over 31 of which is used for the system
file cache.

So I run "select count(*) from large_table" and I see in xosview a solid
block of write activity. Runtime is 28125.644 ms for the first run. The
second run does not show a block of write activity and takes 3327.441 ms

top shows that this writing is being done by kjournald. What is going on
here? There is not a lot of write activity on this server so there
should not be a significant number of dirty cache pages that kjournald
would need to write out before it could read in my table. Certainly in
the 31G being used for file cache there should be enough non-dirty pages
that could be dropped to read in my table w/o having to flush anything
to disk. My table size is 2,870,927,360 bytes.

# cat /proc/sys/vm/dirty_expire_centisecs
2999

I restarted postgres and ran a count(*) on an even larger table.

[local]=> explain analyze select count(*) from et;
QUERY PLAN
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Aggregate (cost=6837051.82..6837051.83 rows=1 width=0) (actual
time=447240.157..447240.157 rows=1 loops=1)
-> Seq Scan on et (cost=0.00..6290689.25 rows=218545025 width=0)
(actual time=5.971..400326.911 rows=218494524 loops=1)
Total runtime: 447240.402 ms
(3 rows)

Time: 447258.525 ms
[local]=> explain analyze select count(*) from et;
QUERY PLAN
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Aggregate (cost=6837113.44..6837113.45 rows=1 width=0) (actual
time=103011.724..103011.724 rows=1 loops=1)
-> Seq Scan on et (cost=0.00..6290745.95 rows=218546995 width=0)
(actual time=9.844..71629.497 rows=218496012 loops=1)
Total runtime: 103011.832 ms
(3 rows)

Time: 103012.523 ms

[local]=> select pg_relation_size('et');
pg_relation_size
------------------
33631543296
(1 row)

I posted xosview snapshots from the two runs at:
http://www.tupari.net/2009-12-9/ This time the first run showed a mix of
read/write activity instead of the solid write I saw before.