Hi, Below command has been running since ~700 minutes in one of our PostgreSQL servers. DELETE FROM mugpsreglog WHERE NOT EXISTS (SELECT 1 FROM mueventlog WHERE mueventlog.eventlogid = mugpsreglog.eventlogid); Seq Scan on mugpsreglog (cost=0.00..57184031821394.73 rows=6590986 width=6) Filter: (NOT (subplan)) SubPlan -> Seq Scan on mueventlog (cost=0.00..4338048.00 rows=1 width=0) Filter: (eventlogid = $0) Here is some information about related tables: # SELECT pg_relation_size('emove.mueventlog') / pow(1024, 2); ?column? ---------- 11440 (1 row) # SELECT pg_relation_size('emove.mugpsreglog') / pow(1024, 2); ?column? ------------- 631.8046875 (1 row) And there isn't any constraints (FK/PK), triggers, indexes, etc. on any of the tables. (We're in the phase of a migration, many DELETE commands similar to above gets executed to relax constraints will be introduced.) Here are related postgresql.conf lines: shared_buffers = 512MB max_prepared_transactions = 0 work_mem = 8MB maintenance_work_mem = 512MB max_fsm_pages = 204800 max_fsm_relations = 8192 vacuum_cost_delay = 10 wal_buffers = 2MB checkpoint_segments = 128 checkpoint_timeout = 1h checkpoint_completion_target = 0.5 checkpoint_warning = 1min effective_cache_size = 5GB autovacuum = off And system hardware & software profile is: OS : Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES release 4 (Nahant Update 5) PostgreSQL: 8.3.1 Filesystem: GFS (IBM DS4700 SAN) CPU : 4 x Quad Core Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 3.00GHz Memory : 8GB Does anybody have an idea what might be causing the problem? Any suggestions to improve the performance during such bulk DELETEs? Regards.