On 03/22/2018 11:33 AM, Alessandro Aste wrote: > Tomas, thank you. This machine is abare metal server running only a > staging postgresql 10.3 instance. Nobody is using it beside me. > > I'm attaching 4 files. > > every_30_seconds_top_stats_during_query.txt - this is a caputure of > the top command every 30 seconds(more or less) for 10+ minutes while I'm > running the query. Let me know if this helps to answere your question. > EXPLAIN_WITH_LIMIT_AND_max_parallel_workers_per_gather_SET_TO_0.txt - > query plan with full query and max_parallel_workers_per_gather force > to 0. Full output. > EXPLAIN_WITH_LIMIT_AND_DEFAULT_PARALLEL_PROCESSING_SETTINGS.txt - > query plan with full query and default parellel processing settings. > Full output. > EXPLAIN_WITHOUT_LIMIT_AND_DEFAULT_PARALLEL_PROCESSING_SETTINGS.tx - > query plan of the query omitting the LIMIT clause and default parellel > processing settings. Full output. > OK. Looking at the top output, I see this: PID USER VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 104880 postgres 30.8g 1.9g 1.9g R 92.0 1.5 15:15.60 postmaster 111732 postgres 30.8g 476m 473m R 88.2 0.4 0:00.47 postmaster 111730 postgres 30.8g 473m 470m R 86.4 0.4 0:00.46 postmaster 111731 postgres 30.8g 476m 473m R 86.4 0.4 0:00.46 postmaster 111733 postgres 30.8g 476m 473m R 86.4 0.4 0:00.46 postmaster 111734 postgres 30.8g 476m 473m R 86.4 0.4 0:00.46 postmaster 111728 root 15824 1912 828 R 3.8 0.0 0:00.04 top That means it certainly is not stuck, it's simply doing a lot of work on CPU. The question is why and what it's doing ... Can you collect some CPU profiles using perf? There's a howto here: https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Profiling_with_perf But in short - install perf, install debuginfo packages for postgres, and then do perf record -a -g -s sleep 60 while running the query. Once the profile data is collected, do perf report > report.txt and share the report.txt with us (well, if it's very large you may need to only cut the first 1000 lines or so). That should tell us in which functions most of the time is spent. That will give us some hints, hopefully. > > For what concerns the self-contained test case - I'll do my best to > prepare it. > Yeah, that would be helpful. regards -- Tomas Vondra http://www.2ndQuadrant.com PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Remote DBA, Training & Services