On Jan 3, 2008 6:48 AM, Brian Modra <epailty@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Hi, > > > I have a pretty "live" table: rows being inserted and updated more > than once 1 per second, though far, far more inserts than updates. > > There are currently over 3 million rows. > > It has not been vacuumed for months. How many rows per second? 1? all of them? Kinda makes a difference. If it was 1 a second updated for 3 months that's about 7million dead rows. If it was all 3million, then that's 7million * 3million dead rows, also know as a whole bunch of rows. Either way, you probably have a table so terribly bloated that a regular vacuum will not help you in terms of speeding it up. Regular vacuums are like brushing your teeth three times a day. If you've forgotten for three months, brushing them once isn't likely to fix all the cavities you've got. Same thing here. You'll either need a vacuum full or a cluster. Cluster is often faster. Or you can try selecting everything into a temp table, truncating the real table, and inserting the data back in. Truncation will remove all rows, dead or otherwise. The advantage is that it's often faster to truncate / reload than it is to vacuum full. If you have indexes, you might want to drop them while re-inserting and then recreated them. ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 2: Don't 'kill -9' the postmaster
