Re: Occasional giant spikes in CPU load

Craig James <craig_james@emolecules.com> writes:
> So what is it that will cause every single Postgres backend to come to life at the same moment, when there's no real
loadon the server?  Maybe if a backend crashes?  Some other problem? 

sinval queue overflow comes to mind ... although that really shouldn't
happen if there's "no real load" on the server.  What PG version is
this?  Also, the pg_stat_activity view contents when this happens would
probably be more useful to look at than "top" output.

            regards, tom lane