On 10/26/11 8:47 AM, Sören Meyer-Eppler wrote: > A fairly complex insert query on an empty destination table will run for > an indefinite amount of time (we waited literally days for the query to > complete). This does not happen every time we run the query but often. > Now ordinarily I'd assume we did something wrong with our indices or > query, but the execution plan looks sane and, more tellingly, we have: > - no CPU load > - no network traffic > - no disk I/O > - no other load on the server except this single query > and strace displaying a seemingly endless list of lseek calls. Hmmmm. If you were on Solaris or OSX, I'd say you'd hit one of their I/O bugs which can cause endless lseeks for individual disk pages. However, I've never seen that particular pattern on Linux (other I/O bugs, but not that one). Questions: (1) is it *only* that query? (2) is there some reason you might have excessive disk fragmentation, like running on a VM? -- Josh Berkus PostgreSQL Experts Inc. http://pgexperts.com -- Sent via pgsql-performance mailing list (pgsql-performance@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-performance