On Tue, 29 Jan 2008, Tom Lane wrote:

On Tue, 29 Jan 2008, Cristian Gafton wrote:
I have a ~150GB sized server, containing two databases that are active in
mostly read mode. I have noticed lately that the global/pgstat.stat file is
somewhere around 1MB freshly after a restart, but at some point it baloons to
74MB in size for no apparent reason, after a few hours of uptime. Needless to
say, having the stats collector dump 74MB of stuff on disk on its every loop
takes a big bite of the I/O capabilities of this box.

Of course, leaving out the most important thing - this is postgresql 8.2.6
on x86_64

Hmm ... do you have autovacuum enabled?  If not, what's the vacuuming
policy on that box?  I'm wondering if this is triggered by something
deciding to vacuum or analyze a bunch of otherwise-unused tables, and
thereby causing stats entries to be created for those tables.

Autovacuum is disabled, since the database is mostly read only. There is a "vacuumdb -a -z" running nightly on the box. However, the application that queries it does a lot of work with temporary tables - would those bloat the stats at all?

You could investigate by comparing the contents of the stats views
before and after the file balloons.  I would expect to see a lot more
rows, and the key is exactly what non-null activity is recorded in
the extra rows.

Any one of the stats views in particular? Currently all of the stats_*
flags are set to "on".

Thanks,

Cristian
--
Cristian Gafton
rPath, Inc.


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