Mark, You are not alone in the fact that when you post your system specifications, CPU and memory are always listed while the disk I/O subsystem invariably is not. This is a very disk intensive operation and I suspect that your disk system is maxed-out. If you want it faster, you will need more I/O capacity. Regards, Ken On Tue, Aug 07, 2007 at 05:58:35AM -0700, Mark Makarowsky wrote: > I have a table with 4,889,820 records in it. The > table also has 47 fields. I'm having problems with > update performance. Just as a test, I issued the > following update: > > update valley set test='this is a test' > > This took 905641 ms. Isn't that kind of slow? There > aren't any indexes, triggers, constraints or anything > on this table. The version of Postgres is "PostgreSQL > 8.2.4 on i686-pc-mingw32, compiled by GCC gcc.exe > (GCC) 3.4.2 (mingw-special)". The operating > environment is Windows 2003 Standard Edition w/service > pack 2. It is 2.20 Ghz with 1.0 GB of RAM. Here is > the results from Explain: > > "Seq Scan on valley (cost=0.00..1034083.57 > rows=4897257 width=601)" > > Here are the settings in the postgresql.conf. Any ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 9: In versions below 8.0, the planner will ignore your desire to choose an index scan if your joining column's datatypes do not match