Re: Occasional giant spikes in CPU load

On Wed, 2010-04-07 at 14:37 -0700, Craig James wrote:
> Most of the time Postgres runs nicely, but two or three times a day we get a huge spike in the CPU load that lasts
justa short time -- it jumps to 10-20 CPU loads.  Today it hit 100 CPU loads.  Sometimes days go by with no spike
events. During these spikes, the system is completely unresponsive (you can't even login via ssh). 
>
> I managed to capture one such event using top(1) with the "batch" option as a background process.  See output below -
itshows 19 active postgress processes, but I think it missed the bulk of the spike. 

What does iostat 5 say during the jump?

Joshua D. Drake



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