Re: 9.1.3 backends getting stuck in 'startup'

Jeff Frost <jeff(at)pgexperts(dot)com> writes:
> On May 24, 2012, at 3:13 PM, Tom Lane wrote:
>> Huh. A bit bigger, but not by that much. It doesn't seem like this
>> would be enough to make seqscan performance fall off a cliff, as it
>> apparently did. Unless maybe the slightly-bloated catalogs were just a
>> bit too large to fit in RAM, and so the repeated seqscans went from
>> finding all their data in kernel disk buffers to finding none of it?

> Seems unlikely.
> Server has 128GB of RAM.

Hm ... sure seems like that ought to be enough ;-), even with a near-2GB
pg_attribute table. What's your shared_buffers setting?

> BTW, when I connected to it this time, I had a really long time before my psql was able to send a query, so it seems to be still broken at least.

Yeah, I was afraid that re-initdb would be at best a temporary solution.

It would probably be useful to confirm the theory that relcache rebuild
is what makes it stall. You should be able to manually remove the
pg_internal.init file in the database's directory; then connect with
psql, and time how long it takes before the pg_internal.init file
reappears.

regards, tom lane