bock@openit.de (Julian v. Bock) writes:
> I have the problem that on our servers it happens regularly under a
> certain workload (several times per minute) that all backend processes
> get a SIGUSR1 and spend several seconds in ProcessCatchupEvent().
This is fixed in 8.4 and up.
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-committers/2008-06/msg00227.php
If you aren't willing to move off 8.3 you might be able to ameliorate
the problem by reducing the volume of catalog changes, but that can be
pretty hard if you're dependent on temp tables.
regards, tom lane