Recently we had interesting problem. There are some maintenance tools, that do stuff that touch database. One can be calling repack, another can be specific dump, and yet another can be applying migrations from application.
The problem is that they can step over each other toes, and cause issues.
So we needed to add some way to prevent them from running at the same time…
When you see plan on explain.depesz.com, one of the columns visible is exclusive.
In principle it's simple – take time of current node, subtract times of all sub nodes, and you get how much time was spent in this node alone.
Reality is not that simple. Two things especially make the calculations complicated. CTEs, and InitPlans.
Now, with the just pushed change to Pg::Explain (plan parsing library), and site itself, some of the bad calculations are gone.
Let's see some examples:
Continue reading New changes on explain.depesz.com – fixed calculations of exclusive times