Re: Odd blocking (or massively latent) issue - even with EXPLAIN

Hello again. So sorry for resurrecting such an old thread but the
problem still persists - I've just had very little to report on, until
now...

> > That latter test - won't that pretty much just read from the page
> cache?
> > 'sync' may well have forced dirty pages to disk but does it actually
> > evict them to?
>
> Basically, the cache is avoided because of the size of the file.
> 6000000 blocks at 8k exceeds the size of RAM in the machine, so it
> *should* miss the cache and hit the disk directly. :)

OK, I did this during the problematic time and write speeds (sustained)
are in the order of 250MB/s :) It took just 3m21s to write all ~50GB. We
get read speeds of a wonderfully massive ~530MB/s - the whole file read
in just 1m30s. All metrics gathered with iostat -p <devices> -m 1.

Now, what I have noticed is this; we run two databases on this one
machine. One (DB) is completely operable in a normal way during the slow
period and the other is not. This (unresponsive) database has just two
client processes connected - one is writing, the other is (meant to be)
reading.

Neither registers in pg_locks - one does not block the other at the DB
level. However the write process (INSERTs) is writing between 5 and 10
MB/s. The read process (a SELECT or EXPLAIN) just spins the CPU at 100%
and register 0.0 MB/s - yet it should be reading *a lot* of data.

So does PostgreSQL somehow (or have I misconfigured it to) always
prioritise writes over reads?

I'm still at a loss!

Any further pointers would be appreciated.

Jim

PS. This is with the deadline scheduler and with each block device set
with --setra 8192.

> > Anyway, that is off topic... perhaps ;)
> >
> > Thanks again,
> >
> > Jim
> >
>
> Cheers
>
> Martin ============================================= Romax Technology
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--
Jim Vanns
Systems Programmer
Framestore