From: Jeffrey W. Baker <jwbaker@acm.org>
To: pgperf <pgsql-performance@postgresql.org>
Subject: Invulnerable VACUUM process thrashing everything
Date: Thu, 29 Dec 2005 14:09:22 -0800
Message-ID: <1135894162.2223.4.camel@toonses.gghcwest.com> (raw)
A few WEEKS ago, the autovacuum on my instance of pg 7.4 unilaterally
decided to VACUUM a table which has not been updated in over a year and
is more than one terabyte on the disk. Because of the very high
transaction load on this database, this VACUUM has been ruining
performance for almost a month. Unfortunately is seems invulnerable to
killing by signals:
# ps ax | grep VACUUM
15308 ? D 588:00 postgres: postgres skunk [local] VACUUM
# kill -HUP 15308
# ps ax | grep VACUUM
15308 ? D 588:00 postgres: postgres skunk [local] VACUUM
# kill -INT 15308
# ps ax | grep VACUUM
15308 ? D 588:00 postgres: postgres skunk [local] VACUUM
# kill -PIPE 15308
# ps ax | grep VACUUM
15308 ? D 588:00 postgres: postgres skunk [local] VACUUM
o/~ But the cat came back, the very next day ...
I assume that if I kill this with SIGKILL, that will bring down every
other postgres process, so that should be avoided. But surely there is
a way to interrupt this. If I had some reason to shut down the
instance, I'd be screwed, it seems.
-jwb
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To: pgsql-performance@postgresql.org
Cc: jwbaker@acm.org
Subject: Re: Invulnerable VACUUM process thrashing everything
In-Reply-To: <1135894162.2223.4.camel@toonses.gghcwest.com>
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