On 02/01/2018, 12:09, "Martin Moore" <martin.moore@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: On 01/01/2018, 17:45, "Peter Geoghegan" <pg@xxxxxxx> wrote: On Mon, Jan 1, 2018 at 8:56 AM, Martin Moore <martin.moore@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Can someone shed some light on this and advise how to prevent it reoccurring? You're using v10, which has these two commits: https://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=postgresql.git;a=commit;h=58b25e98106dbe062cec0f3d31d64977bffaa4af https://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=postgresql.git;a=commit;h=9fab40ad32efa4038d19eaed975bb4c1713ccbc0 Unfortunately, per the commit message of the first commit, it doesn't look like the tuple allocator uses any new strategy, at least until this v11 commit: https://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=postgresql.git;a=commit;h=a4ccc1cef5a04cc054af83bc4582a045d5232cb3 My guess is that that would make a noticeable difference, once v11 becomes available. Could you test this yourself by building from the master branch? -- Peter Geoghegan Thanks Peter. I don’t really want to go down that route for various reasons. There’s a task that copies ‘old’ rows to various old_ tables and then deletes from the main tables, then does a vaccum and analyse. Tables only have 20-30k rows. I’m guessing this may be the trigger for the problem so have changed the timing from every 20 mins to once in the middle of the night when things are quiet. Would this explain the problem? Martin. ====================================================================================================== Having stopped the suspect task, I’m still getting the same problem. Can’t even stop postgres: waiting for server to shut down............................................................... failed pg_ctl: server does not shut down We’ve spent 2 yrs and a chunk of cash on a total system redesign and this is going to stop it from being released. Can someone give me an idea what may be causing this – and what ReorderBufferGetTupleBuf is actually doing in case it gives me a clue. Thanks.