Re: Massive table (500M rows) update nightmare

On Thu, Jan 7, 2010 at 2:48 PM, Carlo Stonebanks
<stonec.register@sympatico.ca> wrote:
> Doing the updates in smaller chunks resolved these apparent freezes - or,
> more specifically, when the application DID freeze, it didn't do it for more
> than 30 seconds. In all likelyhood, this is the OS and the DB thrashing.

It might well be checkpoints.  Have you tried cranking up checkpoint
segments to something like 100 or more and seeing how it behaves then?