On Wed, 2010-04-07 at 14:37 -0700, Craig James wrote: > 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. What does iostat 5 say during the jump? Joshua D. Drake -- PostgreSQL.org Major Contributor Command Prompt, Inc: http://www.commandprompt.com/ - 503.667.4564 Consulting, Training, Support, Custom Development, Engineering Respect is earned, not gained through arbitrary and repetitive use or Mr. or Sir. -- Sent via pgsql-performance mailing list (pgsql-performance@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-performance