On Tue, Aug 21, 2012 at 2:45 AM, Scott Marlowe <scott.marlowe@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > sometimes I hate my laptops touchpad. Ran something similar in php > got similar performance. By comparison, running select 1 instead of > nextval() took ~0.160s to run. you're mostly measuring client overhead i think: postgres=# explain analyze select nextval('s') from generate_series(1,1000); explain analyze select nextval('s') from generate_series(1,1000); QUERY PLAN --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Function Scan on generate_series (cost=0.00..12.50 rows=1000 width=0) (actual time=0.149..1.320 rows=1000 loops=1) Total runtime: 1.806 ms postgres=# do $$ begin for x in 1..1000 loop perform nextval('s'); end loop; end; $$ language plpgsql; DO Time: 4.333 ms Anyways, the only reason to do advisory locking is if you a) strictly need contiguous blocks of ids and b) are worried about concurrency and the id is fetched early in a non-trivial transaction If a) isn't true, it's better to do looped nextval, and if b) isn't true, IMO it's better to maintain a value in a table and let mvcc handle things. Being able to grab sequences in a block without manual locking would be a nice feature but only if it could be done without adding an iota of overhead to standard usage :-). merlin -- Sent via pgsql-performance mailing list (pgsql-performance@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-performance