Thanks again Claudio.
It does not look like its locked/blocked - but your hint about doing
this task in smaller batches is a good one, and it would be easy enough
to organise.
I am going to let this task run over the week-end, and then decide.
Either way, I shall update this thread.
Much obliged!
Harry Mantheakis
London, UK
On 24/06/2011 12:39, Claudio Freire wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 24, 2011 at 1:19 PM, Harry Mantheakis
> <harry.mantheakis@riskcontrollimited.com> wrote:
>>> there are lots of ways in which it could be struggling...
>> I have been monitoring the server with IOSTAT -d and IOSTAT -c and I cannot
>> see anything alarming.
> If iostat doesn't show disk load, either iostat doesn't work well
> (which could be the case, I've found a few broken installations here
> and there), or, perhaps, your update is waiting on some other update.
>
> I've seen cases when there are application-level deadlocks (ie,
> deadlocks, but that the database alone cannot detect, and then your
> queries stall like that. It happens quite frequently if you try such a
> massive update on a loaded production server. In those cases, the
> technique someone mentioned (updating in smaller batches) usually
> works nicely.
>
> You should be able to see if it's locked waiting for something with
> "select * from pg_stat_activity".