From: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
To: Craig James <craig_james@emolecules.com>
Cc: pgsql-performance@postgresql.org
Subject: Re: Occasional giant spikes in CPU load
Date: Wed, 07 Apr 2010 17:59:08 -0400
Message-ID: <8127.1270677548@sss.pgh.pa.us> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <4BBCFB12.1010306@emolecules.com>
References: <k2pda0294261004061437p9cd3810dqe9ce528b6ddb0873@mail.gmail.com>
<m2m603c8f071004071413w1f2d2497hbbe07d9c6491848f@mail.gmail.com>
<4BBCFB12.1010306@emolecules.com>
Craig James <craig_james@emolecules.com> writes:
> Most of the time Postgres runs nicely, but two or three times a day we get a huge spike in the CPU load that lasts just a short time -- it jumps to 10-20 CPU loads. Today it hit 100 CPU loads. Sometimes days go by with no spike events. During these spikes, the system is completely unresponsive (you can't even login via ssh).
> I managed to capture one such event using top(1) with the "batch" option as a background process. See output below - it shows 19 active postgress processes, but I think it missed the bulk of the spike.
> Any ideas where I can look to find what's triggering this?
> Postgres 8.3.0
^^^^^
If it's really 8.3.0, try updating to 8.3.something-recent. We've fixed
a whole lot of bugs since then.
I have a suspicion that this might be an sinval overrun scenario, in
which case you'd need to update to 8.4 to get a real fix. But updating
in the 8.3 branch would be cheap and easy.
If it is sinval overrun, it would presumably be triggered by a whole lot
of catalog changes being made at approximately the same time. Can you
correlate the spikes with anything like that?
regards, tom lane
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Cc: tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us, craig_james@emolecules.com
Subject: Re: Occasional giant spikes in CPU load
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