John R Pierce <pierce@hogranch.com> writes:
> a beefy system with...
>> Harddrive is just a simple, run-of-the-mill desktop drive.
> which is going to severely limit random write throughput....
True, which is why he's having to flail so hard to keep the checkpoint
from saturating his I/O. However, the latest report says that he
managed that, and yet there's still a one-or-two-second transient of
some sort. I'm wondering what's causing that. If it were at the *end*
of the checkpoint, it might be the disk again (failing to handle a bunch
of fsyncs, perhaps). But if it really is at the *start* then there's
something else odd happening.
regards, tom lane