hi had strange situation today. very high load, cpu saturated (and this machine has lots of cores). i straced one of backends that was using lots of cpu (it was doing some select, but I don't know what as i wasn't able to start psql). strace looked like this: select(0, NULL, NULL, NULL, {0, 1000}) = 0 (Timeout) select(0, NULL, NULL, NULL, {0, 1000}) = 0 (Timeout) select(0, NULL, NULL, NULL, {0, 1000}) = 0 (Timeout) select(0, NULL, NULL, NULL, {0, 1000}) = 0 (Timeout) select(0, NULL, NULL, NULL, {0, 1000}) = 0 (Timeout) select(0, NULL, NULL, NULL, {0, 1000}) = 0 (Timeout) select(0, NULL, NULL, NULL, {0, 1000}) = 0 (Timeout) select(0, NULL, NULL, NULL, {0, 1000}) = 0 (Timeout) select(0, NULL, NULL, NULL, {0, 1000}) = 0 (Timeout) select(0, NULL, NULL, NULL, {0, 1000}) = 0 (Timeout) select(0, NULL, NULL, NULL, {0, 1000}) = 0 (Timeout) select(0, NULL, NULL, NULL, {0, 1000}) = 0 (Timeout) i.e. lots (literally hundreds) of such messages. very quickly adding new ones. pg version is: PostgreSQL 8.3.12 on x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu, compiled by GCC gcc (GCC) 4.1.2 20080704 (Red Hat 4.1.2-48) I know it's not much of information, but perhaps it will ring someones bell, and there will be ready answer what went wrong? Best regards, depesz -- Linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/in/depesz / blog: http://www.depesz.com/ jid/gtalk: depesz@xxxxxxxxxx / aim:depeszhdl / skype:depesz_hdl / gg:6749007 -- Sent via pgsql-general mailing list (pgsql-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-general