Rod Taylor <pg(at)rbt(dot)ca> writes:
> I not convinced it is waiting on a lock. The queries on that table are
> very short (couple of milliseconds) -- but there are a ton of them. All
> backends appear to be idle (pg_stat_activity with command shown) when we
> start the drop and shortly after huge backups occur.
Well, you could prove the point by attaching to the backend with a
debugger and getting a stack trace ... if it's not waiting for a lock,
that would give us some idea what it is doing ...
regards, tom lane