Date: Tue, 13 Apr 2010 17:55:22 -0400
From: Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@commandprompt.com>
To: Chris <lists@deksai.com>
Cc: pgsql-performance@postgresql.org
Subject: Re: stats collector suddenly causing lots of IO
Message-ID: <20100413215522.GI2990@alvh.no-ip.org>
References: <20100413170105.GA29571@chris-laptop.a2hosting.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Disposition: inline
In-Reply-To: <20100413170105.GA29571@chris-laptop.a2hosting.com>
User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.20 (2009-06-14)

Chris wrote:
> I have a lot of centos servers which are running postgres.  Postgres isn't used
> that heavily on any of them, but lately, the stats collector process keeps
> causing tons of IO load.  It seems to happen only on servers with centos 5.

Does this correlate to an increase in size of the pgstat.stat file?
Maybe you could try resetting stats, so that the file goes back to an
initial size and is slowly repopulated.  I'd suggest monitoring the size
of the stats file, just in case there's something abnormal with it.

-- 
Alvaro Herrera                                http://www.CommandPrompt.com/
PostgreSQL Replication, Consulting, Custom Development, 24x7 support