# Chapter 5: The Waiting Game (Workloads & Wait Events) Why is the database so slow today? Is it resting? Is it trapped in an infinite loop? Usually, it's waiting for something. Every operation interacts with the Operating System, and sometimes it just has to stand in line. Let's meet the bouncers (Locks), the traffic jams (IO), and the sleeping alarm clocks that make up the Postgres Waiting Game. Each of the [[_Postgres Operations]] has an interaction with the underlying OS. See [Wait Event Table](https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/monitoring-stats.html#WAIT-EVENT-TABLE) [[Activity]] [[BufferPin]] [[CPU]] [[Client]] [[Extension]] [[IO]] [[IPC]] [[Lock]] [[LWLock]] [[Timeout]]