Extremely high CPU usage when building tables

Hello,

When I run an SQL to create new tables and indexes is when Postgres consumes all CPU and impacts other users on the server.

We are running Postgres 8.3.7 on a Sun M5000 with 2 x quad core CPUs (16 threads) running Solaris 10.

I've attached the sar data at the time of the run- here's a snip-it below.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!
Deb

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Here, note the run queue, the left column. That is the number of processes waiting to run. 97 processes waiting to run at any time with only eight CPU cores looks very busy.

root(at)core2 # sar -q 5 500

SunOS core2 5.10 Generic_142900-11 sun4u 06/17/2010

12:01:50 runq-sz %runocc swpq-sz %swpocc
12:01:55 1.8 80 0.0 0
12:02:00 1.0 20 0.0 0
12:02:05 1.0 20 0.0 0
12:02:10 0.0 0 0.0 0
12:02:15 0.0 0 0.0 0
12:02:21 3.3 50 0.0 0
12:02:26 1.0 20 0.0 0
12:02:31 1.0 60 0.0 0
12:02:36 1.0 20 0.0 0
12:02:42 27.0 50 0.0 0
12:02:49 32.8 83 0.0 0
12:02:55 76.0 100 0.0 0
12:03:01 66.1 100 0.0 0
12:03:07 43.8 100 0.0 0
12:03:13 52.0 100 0.0 0
12:03:19 91.2 100 0.0 0
12:03:26 97.8 83 0.0 0
12:03:33 63.7 100 0.0 0
12:03:39 67.4 100 0.0 0
12:03:47 41.5 100 0.0 0
12:03:53 82.0 83 0.0 0
12:03:59 88.7 100 0.0 0
12:04:06 87.7 50 0.0 0
12:04:12 41.3 100 0.0 0
12:04:17 94.3 50 0.0 0
12:04:22 1.0 20 0.0 0
12:04:27 3.3 60 0.0 0
12:04:32 1.0 20 0.0 0
12:04:38 0.0 0 0.0 0