ANote: some disk activety should be expected. Maybe postgresql updates
>the log? Or at the very least it will update the atime timestamps for
>the files everytime they're read. This shouldn't cause enough disk
>activity to become a performance-problem, but if I remember your initial
>post correctly, you indicated that one processor was fully saturated.
>
>Maybe the problem is in fact related to locking and smp, and not related
>to shared-memory and disk activity?
Then, please correct me if I'm wrong: I should be able to test your
hypothesis by creating a small DB (of say 2MB) and setting up at least a
dozen backends to tag it. If I get the same symptoms w/ respect to disk
activity/performance then we could say that the problem is not related to
shared memory/the amount of data/swapping.
What log files are output from postgres? I was under the impression that
postmaster's stdout/stderr were the only output. I've been postmaster
xyz >& log.txt'ing it. I'll check into this.
Thanks a lot for your help :-)
-Xavier
_________________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com