Thanks, guys, I'll start planning on upgrading to PG8.1 Would this problem change it's nature in any way on the recent Dual-Core Intel XEON MP machines? Thanks, Anjan -----Original Message----- From: Tom Lane [mailto:tgl@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] Sent: Tuesday, November 22, 2005 12:36 PM To: Vivek Khera Cc: Postgresql Performance; Anjan Dave Subject: Re: [PERFORM] High context switches occurring Vivek Khera <vivek@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > On Nov 22, 2005, at 11:59 AM, Anjan Dave wrote: >> This is a Dell Quad XEON. Hyperthreading is turned on, and I am >> planning to turn it off as soon as I get a chance to bring it down. > You should probably also upgrade to Pg 8.0 or newer since it is a > known problem with XEON processors and older postgres versions. > Upgrading Pg may solve your problem or it may not. PG 8.1 is the first release that has a reasonable probability of avoiding heavy contention for the buffer manager lock when there are multiple CPUs. If you're going to update to try to fix this, you need to go straight to 8.1. I've recently been chasing a report from Rob Creager that seems to indicate contention on SubTransControlLock, so the slru code is likely to be our next bottleneck to fix :-( regards, tom lane
