thx for your reply :) -the timings come from the log -the table is this -> \d configurations Table "public.configurationcontext" Column | Type | Modifiers -------------------+------------------------+----------- id | numeric(18,0) | not null category | numeric(18,0) | pr_oid | numeric(18,0) | var_attrs | character varying(255) | num_value | numeric(18,0) | Indexes: "pk_configurations" PRIMARY KEY, btree (id) "conf_index" btree (category, pr_oid, num_value) and one query is this -> SELECT * FROM configurations WHERE pr_oid=$1 AND num_value=$2 -the table has only 2500 rows -this messages used to appear a lot after i created a new index for the 2 columns mentioned above in the query, since i thought that the 3-column index wouldnt be of much help since the first column was not defined in the query. now i have dropped this extra index and i see much less records in the log about the bind/parse phase of the query -the server has 4 cores, 12 GB ram, and fata disks. the settings from the query are these -> name | current_setting ---------------------------------+------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ version | PostgreSQL 8.4.7 on x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu, compiled by GCC gcc (GCC) 4.1.2 20080704 (Red Hat 4.1.2-50), 64-bit archive_command | cp -i %p /var/lib/pgsql/wals/%f </dev/null archive_mode | on autovacuum_analyze_scale_factor | 0.05 autovacuum_vacuum_scale_factor | 0.1 bgwriter_delay | 50ms bgwriter_lru_maxpages | 200 bgwriter_lru_multiplier | 4 checkpoint_completion_target | 0.9 checkpoint_segments | 30 checkpoint_timeout | 15min effective_cache_size | 9GB lc_collate | en_US.UTF-8 lc_ctype | en_US.UTF-8 listen_addresses | * log_checkpoints | off log_directory | pg_log log_filename | postgresql-%a.log log_min_duration_statement | 50ms log_rotation_age | 1d log_rotation_size | 0 log_truncate_on_rotation | on logging_collector | on maintenance_work_mem | 512MB max_connections | 100 max_prepared_transactions | 20 max_stack_depth | 8MB port | 5432 server_encoding | UTF8 shared_buffers | 2GB synchronous_commit | off temp_buffers | 12800 TimeZone | Europe/Athens wal_buffers | 16MB work_mem | 30MB -- View this message in context: http://postgresql.1045698.n5.nabble.com/parse-bind-take-more-time-than-execute-tp5102940p5107985.html Sent from the PostgreSQL - performance mailing list archive at Nabble.com. -- Sent via pgsql-performance mailing list (pgsql-performance@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-performance