On Tue, Dec 30, 2008 at 10:14 AM, Dan Armbrust
<daniel.armbrust.list@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On paper, their hardware is plenty fast for their workload. Out of
> hundreds of sites, all running the same software putting load on the
> database, this is only the second time where we have seen this odd
> behaviour of very slow vacuums.
>
> I guess I was hoping that someone would be able to chime in and say -
> yes, in so and so version, we fixed an obscure bug that sometimes
> caused huge slowdowns, perhaps when combined with certain linux
> kernels. It was a nice dream anyway :)
This actually kinda sounds like one of those RAID cards that every so
often decides to check the consistency of the RAID array, and when
it's doing that, the whole system slows to a crawl.