On Wed, Apr 11, 2007 at 12:50:37AM +0200, Tobias Brox wrote:
> We had problems again, caused by long running transactions. I'm
> monitoring the pg_stat_activity view, checking the query_start of all
> requests that are not idle - but this one slipped under the radar as the
> application was running frequent queries towards the database.
>
> That's not what concerns me most. We had two databases running under
> postgres at this host - like, main production database (A) and a
> separate smaller database for a separate project (B). As far as I
> understood postgres philosophy, the databases should be isolated from
> each other, i.e. one are not allowed to create a query that goes across
> the database borders (select * from A.customers join B.logins ...). So,
> I was surprised to see that the application working towards database B
> managed to jam up database A, to the extent that we couldn't get A
> vacuumed properly.
Vacuums do ignore other databases, except for shared relations such as
pg_database. If one of the databases wasn't being vacuumed properly it
means there was in fact a transaction open. Note that until recently,
vacuums wouldn't ignore other vacuums, so a long-running vacuum would
prevent repeated vacuums on the same table from accomplishing much.
Are you sure that your monitoring doesn't accidentally ignore
backends marked as <IDLE> in transaction?
--
Jim Nasby jim@nasby.net
EnterpriseDB http://enterprisedb.com 512.569.9461 (cell)
