Hi, I noticed something strange in our PG server. I have a table named 'timetable' that has only one bigint column and one row. Once in every 5 seconds this row is updated to the current time epoch value in milliseconds. The update query seems to be taking considerable time (avg 50 milliseconds). When I tried generating the explain (analyze,buffers) for the query, the planning time + execution time is always less than 0.1 millisecond. However the query time as shown when /timing of psql is enabled shows approx 30 milliseconds (I am connecting via psql from the localhost). Please find the details below. postgres=> select version(); version ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- PostgreSQL 9.4.15 on x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu, compiled by gcc (GCC) 4.4.7 20120313 (Red Hat 4.4.7-18), 64-bit (1 row) Time: 0.572 ms postgres=> \d+ timetable Table "public.timetable" Column | Type | Modifiers | Storage | Stats target | Description --------+--------+-----------+---------+--------------+------------- time | bigint | | plain | | postgres=> table timetable ; time ------------ 1605988584 (1 row) Time: 0.402 ms postgres=> explain (analyze,buffers,verbose) update timetable set time = time+0; QUERY PLAN ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Update on public.timetable (cost=0.00..4.01 rows=1 width=14) (actual time=0.064..0.064 rows=0 loops=1) Buffers: shared hit=5 -> Seq Scan on public.timetable (cost=0.00..4.01 rows=1 width=14) (actual time=0.029..0.029 rows=1 loops=1) Output: ("time" + 0), ctid Buffers: shared hit=4 Planning time: 0.054 ms Execution time: 0.093 ms (7 rows) Time: 27.685 ms Sometimes this shoots up to even a few hundred milliseconds. postgres=> explain (analyze,buffers,verbose) update timetable set time = time+0; QUERY PLAN ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Update on public.timetable (cost=0.00..4.01 rows=1 width=14) (actual time=0.048..0.048 rows=0 loops=1) Buffers: shared hit=5 -> Seq Scan on public.timetable (cost=0.00..4.01 rows=1 width=14) (actual time=0.027..0.028 rows=1 loops=1) Output: ("time" + 0), ctid Buffers: shared hit=4 Planning time: 0.063 ms Execution time: 0.084 ms (7 rows) Time: 291.090 ms I guess the problem here may somehow be linked to frequent updates to the one row. However I want to understand what exactly is going wrong here. Also I don't understand the discrepancy between planning + execution time from explain analyze and the time taken by the query as reported in pg log and in psql console. Kindly help me on this. Regards, Nanda