Re: 9.1.3 backends getting stuck in 'startup'

On Apr 27, 2012, at 6:15 PM, Tom Lane wrote:

> Jeff Frost <jeff@pgexperts.com> writes:
>> Oh, good idea!  Looks like pg_buffercache is installed in this DB.  Cust=
omer
>> reports that it has been installed since the server has existed (and on =
the
>> previous server) but is not currently being used, though the issue with =
the
>> hanging startups did not start until this morning. Could it still cause
>> contention even if it's not being executed?
>=20
> No, it shouldn't.  Perhaps we should start asking questions around the
> idea of "so what changed this morning?".  There has to have been some
> triggering cause, a configuration change or application change or
> something.


Since I had a theory that it's probably stalling on pg_catalog access, one =
of the guys wrote a test harness that makes several connections and creates=
 and drops lots of temp tables. That does seem to allow us to reproduce the=
 issue in the production DB, but not in a newly created DB.  So, we're abou=
t to initdb a new data directory and slony replicate the data over to it on=
 the original server.