using PostgreSQL 9.1.2 I'm seeing excessive CPU usage and large amounts of writes to disk from postmaster tasks. This happens even while my application is doing almost nothing (10s of inserts per MINUTE). There are a reasonable number of connections open however. I've been trying to determine what in my application is causing this. I'm pretty newb with postgresql, and haven't gotten anywhere so far. I've turned on some logging options in my config file, and looked at connections in the pg_stat_activity table, but they are all idle. Yet each connection consumes ~ 50% CPU, and is writing ~15M/s to disk (reading nothing). I'm basically using the stock postgresql.conf with very little tweaks. I'd appreciate any advice or pointers on what I can do to track this down. Here is a sample of what top/iotop is showing me: Cpu(s): 18.9%us, 14.4%sy, 0.0%ni, 53.4%id, 11.8%wa, 0.0%hi, 1.5%si, 0.0%st Mem: 32865916k total, 7263720k used, 25602196k free, 575608k buffers Swap: 16777208k total, 0k used, 16777208k free, 4464212k cached PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 17057 postgres 20 0 236m 33m 13m R 45.0 0.1 73:48.78 postmaster 17188 postgres 20 0 219m 15m 11m R 42.3 0.0 61:45.57 postmaster 17963 postgres 20 0 219m 16m 11m R 42.3 0.1 27:15.01 postmaster 17084 postgres 20 0 219m 15m 11m S 41.7 0.0 63:13.64 postmaster 17964 postgres 20 0 219m 17m 12m R 41.7 0.1 27:23.28 postmaster 18688 postgres 20 0 219m 15m 11m R 41.3 0.0 63:46.81 postmaster 17088 postgres 20 0 226m 24m 12m R 41.0 0.1 64:39.63 postmaster 24767 postgres 20 0 219m 17m 12m R 41.0 0.1 24:39.24 postmaster 18660 postgres 20 0 219m 14m 9.9m S 40.7 0.0 60:51.52 postmaster 18664 postgres 20 0 218m 15m 11m S 40.7 0.0 61:39.61 postmaster 17962 postgres 20 0 222m 19m 11m S 40.3 0.1 11:48.79 postmaster 18671 postgres 20 0 219m 14m 9m S 39.4 0.0 60:53.21 postmaster 26168 postgres 20 0 219m 15m 10m S 38.4 0.0 59:04.55 postmaster Total DISK READ: 0.00 B/s | Total DISK WRITE: 195.97 M/s TID PRIO USER DISK READ DISK WRITE SWAPIN IO> COMMAND 17962 be/4 postgres 0.00 B/s 14.83 M/s 0.00 % 0.25 % postgres: aggw aggw [local] idle 17084 be/4 postgres 0.00 B/s 15.53 M/s 0.00 % 0.24 % postgres: aggw aggw [local] idle 17963 be/4 postgres 0.00 B/s 15.00 M/s 0.00 % 0.24 % postgres: aggw aggw [local] idle 17188 be/4 postgres 0.00 B/s 14.80 M/s 0.00 % 0.24 % postgres: aggw aggw [local] idle 17964 be/4 postgres 0.00 B/s 15.50 M/s 0.00 % 0.24 % postgres: aggw aggw [local] idle 18664 be/4 postgres 0.00 B/s 15.13 M/s 0.00 % 0.23 % postgres: aggw aggw [local] idle 17088 be/4 postgres 0.00 B/s 14.71 M/s 0.00 % 0.13 % postgres: aggw aggw [local] idle 18688 be/4 postgres 0.00 B/s 14.72 M/s 0.00 % 0.00 % postgres: aggw aggw [local] idle 24767 be/4 postgres 0.00 B/s 14.93 M/s 0.00 % 0.00 % postgres: aggw aggw [local] idle 18671 be/4 postgres 0.00 B/s 16.14 M/s 0.00 % 0.00 % postgres: aggw aggw [local] idle 17057 be/4 postgres 0.00 B/s 13.58 M/s 0.00 % 0.00 % postgres: aggw aggw [local] idle 26168 be/4 postgres 0.00 B/s 15.50 M/s 0.00 % 0.00 % postgres: aggw aggw [local] idle 18660 be/4 postgres 0.00 B/s 15.85 M/s 0.00 % 0.00 % postgres: aggw aggw [local] idle