On Tue, Apr 20, 2010 at 01:44:18PM -0400, Robert Haas wrote: - On Tue, Apr 20, 2010 at 1:39 PM, David Kerr <dmk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: - > My initial thought was hardware issues so we got sar, vmstat, etc all running on the box and they didn't give - > any indication that we had resource issues. - > - > So I decided to just make the 2 PG config files look the same. (the only change was dropping effective_cache_size - > from 128GB to 2GB). - > - > Now the large box performs the same as the smaller box. (which is fine). - > - > incidentally, both tests were starting from a blank database. - > - > Is this expected? - - Lowering effective_cache_size tends to discourage the planner from - using a nested-loop-with-inner-indexscan plan - that's it. - - What may be happening is that you may be loading data into some tables - and then running a query against those tables before the autovacuum - daemon has a chance to analyze them. I suspect that if you enable - some logging you'll find that one of those queries is really, really - slow, and that (by happy coincidence) discouraging it from using the - index it thinks it should use happens to produce a better plan. What - you should probably do is, for each table that you bulk load and then - query, insert a manual ANALYZE between the two. - - ...Robert - that thought occured to me while I was testing this. I ran a vacuumdb -z on my database during the load and it didn't impact performance at all. Incidentally the code is written to work like this : while (read X lines in file){ Process those lines. write lines to DB. } So i would generally expect to get the benefits of the updated staticis once the loop ended. no? (would prepared statements affect that possibly?) Also, while I was debugging the problem, I did load a 2nd file into the DB ontop of one that had been loaded. So the statistics almost certinaly should have been decent at that point. I did turn on log_min_duration_statement but that caused performance to be unbearable, but i could turn it on again if it would help. Dave -- Sent via pgsql-performance mailing list (pgsql-performance@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-performance