> [...]
> Right, the file is fully written under a temp name, and then
> rename()'d
This makes sense and is almost certainly not the cause of the problem.
Although there is a lot more data being written to that file than I
would have thought.
One of Sun's kernel engineers has come up with a solution that seems to
have fixed the problem. Instead of increasing work_mem (which we still
might do) we've mounted a swapfs partition over the pg temp directory:
# mount | grep pgsql_tmp
/export/data/pgsql/data/base/64920741/pgsql_tmp on swap [...]
This has actually reduced the disk activity considerably. So far, the
blocking problem seems to have gone.
Now to find some Postgres DBAs in Sydney to do some review / tuning of
our memory settings. :-)
Dan
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