Re: poor cpu utilization on dual cpu box

Josh Berkus <josh@agliodbs.com> writes:
>> We are running with shared buffers large enough to hold the
>> entire database

> Which is bad.   This is not what shared buffers are for.  See:
> http://www.varlena.com/varlena/GeneralBits/Tidbits/perf.html

In fact, that may be the cause of the performance issue.  The high
context-swap rate suggests heavy contention for shared-memory data
structures.  The first explanation that occurs to me is that too much
time is being spent managing the buffer hashtable, causing that to
become a serialization bottleneck.  Try setting shared_buffers to 10000
or so and see if it gets better.

            regards, tom lane