Hi, we run postgresql-8.1 on a dedicated debian box 64bit, dual-core CPU, 8GB RAM, RAID-1. We select our primary keys with select nextval before we actually insert a record. In my logs i print every statement which takes longer than 250ms there are lots of values fetched each day with nextval, but i have about 20-50 statements each day which take up to 17 seconds(!): LOG: duration: 12636.746 ms statement: EXECUTE <unnamed> [PREPARE: select nextval ('member_id_seq')] [it is always the same statement so i just show some numbers: LOG: duration: 4000.991 ms ... LOG: duration: 2994.532 ms ... LOG: duration: 611.167 ms ... LOG: duration: 17072.196 ms LOG: duration: 16570.860 ms LOG: duration: 14816.153 ms LOG: duration: 265.855 ms LOG: duration: 1238.361 ms ... there are about 50 commands per day like this taking longer than 250ms. i have no idea why something like nextval() can take longer than 1ms. and if i do it manually it shows up like this: select nextval ('member_id_seq'); nextval --------- 569304 (1 row) Time: 0.651 ms Unfortunatly i can not tell at which time this happens as the log doesn't show the time of day. As it is a web application everything above 250ms is not acceptable. Something like 17seconds (!) is like not working at all. i observe my server with munin and the load of the server is at the maximum about 0.5. Can this be related to the autovacuum process, which we run every 50 minutes? It seems that something is blocked. But i thought that nextval is never blocked by anyhing else. now i looked at some stats select blks_read, blks_hit from pg_statio_user_sequences; ( i dropped names and relids as they are not important.) blks_read | blks_hit -----------+---------- 2 | 0 22 | 125 14 | 142 2 | 0 14 | 0 43 | 498 27 | 24 34 | 0 25 | 12 55 | 55 8 | 17 2 | 0 14 | 0 34 | 0 2 | 0 33 | 539 58 | 25 59 | 53 34 | 0 2 | 0 2 | 0 39 | 135 2 | 0 38 | 4 34 | 0 2 | 0 14 | 0 15 | 131 23 | 1223 22 | 147 1 | 2015 10 | 2 13 | 67 34 | 0 34 | 0 32 | 3610 46 | 590 I dont have any clue what is happening but something runs rather suboptimal. Any help is very appreciated. kind regards, Janning ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 5: don't forget to increase your free space map settings