Re: 9.1.3 backends getting stuck in 'startup'

On Apr 27, 2012, at 6:15 PM, Tom Lane wrote:

> Jeff Frost <jeff(at)pgexperts(dot)com> writes:
>> Oh, good idea! Looks like pg_buffercache is installed in this DB. Customer
>> reports that it has been installed since the server has existed (and on the
>> previous server) but is not currently being used, though the issue with the
>> hanging startups did not start until this morning. Could it still cause
>> contention even if it's not being executed?
>
> No, it shouldn't. Perhaps we should start asking questions around the
> idea of "so what changed this morning?". There has to have been some
> triggering cause, a configuration change or application change or
> something.

Since I had a theory that it's probably stalling on pg_catalog access, one of the guys wrote a test harness that makes several connections and creates and drops lots of temp tables. That does seem to allow us to reproduce the issue in the production DB, but not in a newly created DB. So, we're about to initdb a new data directory and slony replicate the data over to it on the original server.