On Thu, 2010-06-24 at 17:50 -0700, Craig James wrote: > I'm reviving this question because I never figured it out. To summarize: At random intervals anywhere from a few times per hour to once or twice a day, we see a huge spike in CPU load that essentially brings the system to a halt for up to a minute or two. Previous answers focused on "what is it doing", i.e. is it really Postgres or something else? > > Now the question has narrowed down to this: what could trigger EVERY postgres backend to do something at the same time? See the attached output from "top -b", which shows what is happening during one of the CPU spikes. checkpoint causing IO Wait. What does sar say about these times? Joshua D. Drake -- PostgreSQL.org Major Contributor Command Prompt, Inc: http://www.commandprompt.com/ - 509.416.6579 Consulting, Training, Support, Custom Development, Engineering -- Sent via pgsql-performance mailing list (pgsql-performance@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-performance
