On Fri, 2005-11-11 at 18:02 -0500, Tom Lane wrote: > > There very well could be a pattern in the data which could affect > > things, however, I'm not sure how to identify it in 100K rows out of > > 100M. > > I conjecture that the problem areas represent places where the key > sequence is significantly "more random" than it is elsewhere. Hard > to be more specific than that though. > OK, I understand the pattern now. My two tables hold orders, and order state transitions. Most orders have two transitions: creation and termination. The problem happens when there is a significant number of orders where termination is happening a long time after creation, causing order_transition rows with old ord_id values to be inserted. This is valid, so I have to figure out a way to accomodate it. You mentioned playing with checkpointing and bgwriter earlier in this thread. I experimented with the bgwriter through the weekend, but I don't have a good idea what sensible parameter changes are... Re: checkpointing, currently my checkpoints are happening every 5 minutes (if I turn on fsync, the graph shows checkpoints dramatically). If I increase the checkpoint_timeout, could that be beneficial? Or would I just have more time between larger spikes? -K ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 1: if posting/reading through Usenet, please send an appropriate subscribe-nomail command to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx so that your message can get through to the mailing list cleanly