Re: PostgreSQL hanging on new connections?

On 11/30/2010 03:28 PM, Dusan Misic wrote:
>     We're having similar issues on 8.4.[245]... occasionally psql takes
>     anywhere from a few to several dozen seconds to connect. I've been
>     unsuccessfully trying to blame spikes in the OS run queue (we
>     desperately need some connection pooling) but if it's something to
>     do with locks I can't see in pg_locks, that would explain why I
>     haven't been able to figure out what's going on yet....
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>
> This is normal. PostgreSQL needs to create new server process to handle
> your requested connection.
>
> Then it needs to allocate resources to that new connection. It
> initializes shared memory for that connection. That is the stall you are
> mentioning.

Eh, what?

Forking a backend and attaching to shared memory should *not* take "a
few seconds". On my test machine it takes 100ms to fork psql, connect to
the postmaster, fork a backend, init the backend, authenticate, run a
dummy query and exit psql.

If you're seeing delays like that, your machine is horrifyingly
overloaded or there's something else wrong.

--
Craig Ringer