Brian Maguire <bmaguire@vantage.com> wrote:
>> We though there might be locking, but noticed that there were not any
>> queries in wait mode indicating that no statements were blocked by
>> another statement's lock.
In that case it's not a locking problem, but just a resource-saturation
problem. I'm wondering if you are maxing out your disk drives'
throughput.
Are the slowdowns correlated with checkpoints? (Watch to see if there
is a postmaster child process spawned for checkpointing when it
happens.) Fooling with checkpoint intervals might help some, though
I suspect the only real answer will be 8.0's background-writer feature.
regards, tom lane