Okay ladies and gents and the rest of you :) It's time I dig into another issue, and that's a curious 5 second delay on connect, on occasion. Now, I believe the network to be sound and there are zero errors on any servers, no retrans, no runts, nada nada nada. However I will continue to run tests with/without dns, tcpdumps, tracking communications, handshakes, however. I've been doing some reading and what did I find. I found "Checkpoints are very disrupting to your database performance and can cause connections to stall for up to a few seconds while they occur." Now I'm reaching here, but wondered. My issue is what appears to be a random 5 second connection delay. Connection times over a 24 hour period from my application servers, which connect to my query servers (postgres 8.3.4, slony 1.2.15), big 8 way boxes with 16-32gb ram Conn time in seconds and count. (50 kind of a round even number eh!) '1.0-2.0' => 4, '5.0-' => 50, '0.5-1.0' => 6, '0.0-0.5' => 155,632 So the 5 second makes us instantly think network but I want to hit this from multiple angles, so figured I would reach out to the brain trust here for some ideas. Here is what may be interesting and may point me into a direction of further tuning and adjusting. postgres=# select * from pg_stat_bgwriter; checkpoints_timed | checkpoints_req | buffers_checkpoint | buffers_clean | maxwritten_clean | buffers_backend | buffers_alloc -------------------+-----------------+--------------------+---------------+------------------+-----------------+--------------- 34820 | 207 | 444406118 | 214634102 | 1274873 | 333375850 | 3370607455 (1 row) Now I'll be honest, I have nothing special in my configs for bg_writer, in fact other than enabling log_checkpoints today, I have nothing but defaults for bg_*. but the fact that checkpoints_timed is so high, seams to maybe point to some required tuning? Things of interest. Memory 24gb 8 way processor postgres 8.3.4 shared_buffers = 1500MB # min 128kB or max_connections*16kB max_prepared_transactions = 0 # can be 0 or more work_mem = 100MB # min 64kB maintenance_work_mem = 128MB # min 1MB max_fsm_pages = 500000 # min max_fsm_relations*16, 6 bytes each max_fsm_relations = 225 # min 100, ~70 bytes each fsync = off # turns forced synchronization on or off checkpoint_segments = 100 # in logfile segments, min 1, 16MB each checkpoint_warning = 3600s # 0 is off So nothing exciting in my configs (300 connections).. So my guess is "IF" a really big if, the delay is actually due to checkpoints (perfect lil storm, timing) than there should be ways for me to tune this ya? Thanks "again" for your assistance Tory -- Sent via pgsql-performance mailing list (pgsql-performance@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-performance