> I wonder whether you saw some variant of the deadlock reported in bug > #3883 --- see discussion here: > http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2008-01/msg00873.php > The only known way of getting into that problem is fixed in 8.3, > but a potential for silent deadlock is definitely still there. > I don't however have any idea how such a deadlock could occur without > at least some processes showing as 'waiting' in pg_stat_activity. > > Do you have any idea what the transactions that were blocked at > COMMIT had been doing? Should have just been selects and updates, and perhaps some inserts and deletes - nothing to out of the ordinary or complex. If I can get this to happen consistently, I'll set up a logger to capture all of the SQL statements leading up to the freeze. > > Are there any foreign key constraints leading *to* this table? Nope. Unfortunately, I had been running for a couple of weeks steady before I got the error - so reproducing it may not be quick. But I'm going to set up a couple of parallel tests on more systems, and see if I can happen into it again sooner. Oh, and I don't think though should have anything to do with it, but I did discover that fsync was turned off on this postgres instance. Someone else didn't clean up after a different test, and I forgot to change it back. Thanks, Dan
