Re: Impact of checkpoint_segments under continual load conditions

> I think PFC's question was not directed towards modeling your
> application, but about helping us understand what is going wrong
> (so we can fix it).

Exactly, I was wondering if this delay would allow things to get flushed,
for instance, which would give information about the problem (if giving it
a few minutes of rest resumed normal operation, it would mean that some
buffer somewhere is getting filled faster than it can be flushed).

So, go ahead with a few minutes even if it's unrealistic, that is not the
point, you have to tweak it in various possible manners to understand the
causes.

And instead of a pause, why not just set the duration of your test to
6000 iterations and run it two times without dropping the test table ?

I'm going into wild guesses, but first you should want to know if the
problem is because the table is big, or if it's something else. So you run
the complete test, stopping a bit after it starts to make a mess, then
instead of dumping the table and restarting the test anew, you leave it as
it is, do something, then run a new test, but on this table which already
has data.

'something' could be one of those :
disconnect, reconnect (well you'll have to do that if you run the test
twice anyway)
just wait
restart postgres
unmount and remount the volume with the logs/data on it
reboot the machine
analyze
vacuum
vacuum analyze
cluster
vacuum full
reindex
defrag your files on disk (stopping postgres and copying the database
from your disk to anotherone and back will do)
or even dump'n'reload the whole database

I think useful information can be extracted that way. If one of these
fixes your problem it'l give hints.