Re: Occasional giant spikes in CPU load - Mailing list pgsql-performance

From Craig James
Subject Re: Occasional giant spikes in CPU load
Date
Msg-id 4C24E0E1.7020301@emolecules.com
Whole thread Raw
In response to Re: Occasional giant spikes in CPU load  ("Kevin Grittner" <Kevin.Grittner@wicourts.gov>)
List pgsql-performance
On 6/25/10 9:41 AM, Kevin Grittner wrote:
> Craig James<craig_james@emolecules.com>  wrote:
>
>> I always just assumed that lots of backends that would be harmless
>> if each one was doing very little.
>
> Even if each is doing very little, if a large number of them happen
> to make a request at the same time, you can have problems.  This is
> exactly where a connection pool can massively improve both
> throughput and response time.  If you can arrange it, you want a
> connection pool which will put a limit on active database
> transactions and queue requests to start a new transaction until one
> of the pending ones finishes.

No, that's doesn't seem to be the case.  There is no external activity that triggers this huge spike in usage.  It even
happensto our backup server when only one of us is using it to do a single query.  This problem seems to be triggered
byPostgres itself, not by anything external. 

Per Tom's suggestion, I think upgrading to 8.4.4 is the answer.  I'll learn more when our new hardware comes into use
witha shiny new 8.4.4 installation. 

Craig

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