On Tue, Nov 12, 2013 at 6:22 PM, Jim Nasby <jnasby@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On 11/12/13 6:17 PM, Jeff Janes wrote: >> >> I verified that this is the case--the empty pages remain linked in the >> tree until a vacuum removes them. But walking through empty leaf pages is >> way faster than resolving pages full of pointers to dead-to-all tuple, so >> the kill code still gives a huge benefit. But of course nothing will do >> much good until the transaction horizon advances. > > > Aaaand... that gets to the other problem... our SAN performance is pretty > abysmal. It took ~270 seconds to read 80MB of index pages (+ whatever heap) > to get to the first live tuple. (This was run close enough to the vacuum > that I don't think visibility of these tuples would have changed > mid-stream). That's awful, but 'par for the course' for SANs in my experience. If my math is right, that works out to 27ms / page read. But each index page read can cause multiple heap page reads depending on how the data is organized so I think you are up against the laws of physics. All we can do is to try and organize data so that access patterns are less radom and/or invest in modern hardware. merlin -- Sent via pgsql-performance mailing list (pgsql-performance@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-performance
