Re: Commit takes a long time.

"Peter Childs" <peterachilds(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> Using Postgresql 8.1.10 every so often I get a transaction that takes a
> while to commit.

> I log everything that takes over 500ms and quite reguallly it says things
> like

> 707.036 ms statement: COMMIT

AFAIK there are only two likely explanations for that:

1. You have a lot of deferred triggers that have to run at COMMIT time.

2. The disk system gets so bottlenecked that fsync'ing the commit record
takes a long time.

If it's #2 you could probably correlate the problem with spikes in I/O
activity as seen in iostat or vmstat.

If it is a disk usage spike then I would make the further guess that
what causes it might be a Postgres checkpoint. You might be able to
dampen the spike a bit by playing with the checkpoint parameters, but
the only real fix will be 8.3's spread-out-checkpoints feature.

regards, tom lane