Re: commit so slow program looks frozen - Mailing list pgsql-performance

From Brian Hurt
Subject Re: commit so slow program looks frozen
Date
Msg-id 453FC6AB.5090105@janestcapital.com
Whole thread Raw
In response to Re: commit so slow program looks frozen  ("Carlo Stonebanks" <stonec.register@sympatico.ca>)
List pgsql-performance
Carlo Stonebanks wrote:
You may try to figure out what's the process doing (the backend
obviously, not the frontend (Tcl) process) by attaching to it with
strace.   
It's so sad when us poor Windows guys get helpful hints from people assume 
that we're smart enough to run *NIX... ;-)
 
Maybe it's swamped by a context switch storm (but in that case, probably 
the other processes would be affected as well).   
What is a context switch storm? (and what a great name for a heavy metal 
rock band!)

Interestingly enough, last night (after the original post) I watched three 
of the processes slow down, one after the other - and then stall for so long 
that I had assumed they had frozen. They were all stalled on a message that 
I had put in the script that indicated they had never returned from a 
commit. I have looked into this, and I believe the commits are actually 
going through. 
I have a question for you: did you have a long running query keeping open a transaction?  I've just noticed the same problem here, but things cleaned up immediately when I aborted the long-running transaction.

Note that in my case the long-running transaction wasn't idle in transaction, it was just doing a whole lot of work.

Brian

pgsql-performance by date:

Previous
From: "Joshua D. Drake"
Date:
Subject: Re: Configuration Issue ?
Next
From: "Mark Lonsdale"
Date:
Subject: Re: Configuration Issue ?