Re: PG 8.3 and server load

Phoenix Kiula wrote:
> I'm on a CentOS 5 OS 64 bit, latest kernel and all of that.
> PG version is 8.3.7, compiled as 64bit.
> The memory is 8GB.
> It's a 2 x Dual Core Intel 5310.
> Hard disks are Raid 1, SCSI 15 rpm.
>
> The server is running just one website. So there's Apache 2.2.11,
> MySQL (for some small tasks, almost negligible).
>
> And then there's PG, which in the "top" command shows up as the main beast.
>
> My server load is going to 64, 63, 65, and so on.
>
> Where should I start debugging? What should I see? TOP command does
> not yield anything meaningful. I mean, even if it shows that postgres
> user for "postmaster" and nobody user for "httpd" (apache) are the
> main resource hogs, what should I start with in terms of debugging?
>

1) check if you are using swap space.  Use free and make sure swap/used
is a small number.  Check vmstat and see if swpd is moving up and down.
  (Posting a handful of lines from vmstat might help us).

2) check 'ps ax|grep postgres' and make sure nothing says "idle in
transaction"

3) I had a web box where the number of apache clients was set very high,
and the box was brought to its knees by the sheer number of connections.
  check "ps ax|grep http|wc --lines" and make sure its not too big.
(perhaps less than 100)

-Andy