Ron St-Pierre wrote: > We vacuum only a few of our tables nightly, this one is the last one > because it takes longer to run. I'll probably re-index it soon, but I > would appreciate any advice on how to speed up the vacuum process (and > the db in general). I am a novice to postgreSQL, so I have no answers for you. But for my own education, I am confused by some of your post. > > Okay, here's our system: > postgres 8.1.4 I have postgresql-8.1.9-1.el5 > Linux version 2.4.21 I imagine you mean Linux kernel version; I have 2.6.18-8.1.15.el5PAE > Red Hat Linux 3.2.3 I have no clue what this means. Red Hat Linux 3 must have been in the early 1990s. RHL 5 came out about 1998 IIRC. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, on the other hand, was not numbered like that, as I recall. I no longer run that, but my current RHEL5 is named like this: Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 5 (Tikanga) and for my CentOS 4 system, it is CentOS release 4.5 (Final) Did RHEL3 go with the second dot in their release numbers? I do not remember that. > 8 GB ram > Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 3.20GHz > Raid 5 > autovacuum=off Why would you not have that on? > serves as the application server and database server > server is co-located in another city, hardware upgrade is not > currently an option > > Here's the table information: > The table has 140,000 rows, 130 columns (mostly NUMERIC), 60 indexes. I have designed databases, infrequently, but since the late 1970s. In my experience, my tables had relatively few columns, rarely over 10. Are you sure this table needs so many? Why not, e.g., 13 tables averaging 10 columns each? OTOH, 140,000 rows is not all that many. I have a 6,000,000 row table in my little database on my desktop, and I do not even consider that large. Imagine the size of a database belonging to the IRS, for example. Surely it would have at least one row for each taxpayer and each employer (possibly in two tables, or two databases). Here are the last few lines of a VACUUM VERBOSE; command for that little database. The 6,000,000 row table is not in the database at the moment, nor are some of the other tables, but two relatively (for me) large tables are. CPU 0.00s/0.00u sec elapsed 0.00 sec. INFO: free space map contains 166 pages in 76 relations DETAIL: A total of 1280 page slots are in use (including overhead). 1280 page slots are required to track all free space. Current limits are: 40000 page slots, 1000 relations, using 299 KB. VACUUM stock=> select count(*) from ranks; [table has 10 columns] count -------- 981030 (1 row) stock=> select count(*) from ibd; [table has 8 columns] count --------- 1099789 (1 row) And this is the time for running that psql process, most of which was consumed by slow typing on my part. real 1m40.206s user 0m0.027s sys 0m0.019s My non-default settings for this are # - Memory - shared_buffers = 251000 work_mem = 32768 max_fsm_pages = 40000 I have 8GBytes RAM on this machine, and postgreSQL is the biggest memory user. I set shared_buffers high to try to get some entire (small) tables in RAM and to be sure there is room for indices. -- .~. Jean-David Beyer Registered Linux User 85642. /V\ PGP-Key: 9A2FC99A Registered Machine 241939. /( )\ Shrewsbury, New Jersey http://counter.li.org ^^-^^ 08:40:01 up 1 day, 58 min, 1 user, load average: 4.08, 4.13, 4.17 ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 2: Don't 'kill -9' the postmaster
