“using stale statistics instead of current ones because stats collector is not responding”

Question

My postgresql 9.5 logs shows every minute the message:

using stale statistics instead of current ones because stats collector is not responding

Except a post on serverfault which is not helpfull and seems related to standby databases setup (which is not my case), I don't find anything to solve this.

What's the meaning of this? How can I solve that?

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Additional information based on Greda's reply:

• I have 4 CPU, and in routine less than 5% of 1 CPU is used
• I have 32Gb RAM, and in routine ~ 500Mb are used
• This is not a VM
• This runs Ubuntu 14.04.3 LTS/Linux 3.13.0 SMB x86/64

I have also tried to tweak the postgresql.conf parameters as follows

• shared_buffers: 1024MB
• work_mem: 10MB
• maintenance_work_mem: 1024MB
• effective_cache_size: 4GB

The error message is still there.

P.S: I fully understand that's not a severe error, but it floods my logs, and I have the fear to not see important messages...

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Some additional observation:

• VACUUM FULL VERBOSE ANALYZE doesn't helps
• I have a never ending proccess connected to the database. When this is running, the VACUUM FULL VERBOSE ANALYZE seems blocked.

Can that never ending process be the root causes of my problem? In that case, since I need to have that proccess running, do I have to tweak something on the server?

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Edit:

I had a never ending process connected to the db. I've tried to stop it, and it doesn't helps.

My postgresql.conf file is available there

Answer 1

Disappeard when upgrading to 9.5.2.1 (http://apt.postgresql.org/pub/repos/apt/), but came back after server restart.

It seems that it was due to the service restart during installation

The workaround is to restart the service.

Closed question

Answer 2

To temporarily alleviate the problem until you find a solution, have you tried sending a SIGHUP to the server when it occurs?

I have a similar problem in a fairly different situation: the database runs on a windows desktop PC together with Apache and proprietary machine control software. My case fits in the "slow or overloaded" category. However, I see this happening even at night while the machine is idle. I've been monitoring many system parameters with PRTG to try to find a link with a specific activity, but I can only see the consequences, not the cause.

I don't see this as a simple warning because, once it starts, queries that normally take 100ms will start taking 10 seconds (but still leave other queries unaffected). Also, it stays that way until I send a SIGHUP (pg_ctl.exe reload ...), which I think is weird since the process should resume once it is no longer starved.

P.S. please don't hail me about the windows desktop part: I know, and ... circumstances.

Answer 3

This basically means your (virtual?) machine is too slow or overloaded, because the statistics collector background task is being starved. It is running with a lower priority by default, because you do not want it to disrupt normal database operations (too much).

If you can afford it, add some more CPUs to it and make sure you have plenty of RAM.

Technically though, this is not a severe error - your queries will run, but may be using less than optimal execution plans because they did not see an update to table statistics in a while.

If you want to, you can always force an update of statistics for the most commonly changed tables by running the ANALYZE or VACUUM ANALYZE statements on those.