Fd Habash <fmhabash@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > Based on my research in the forums and Google , it is described in multiple places that ‘select count(*)’ is expected to be slow in Postgres because of the MVCC controls imposed upon the query leading a table scan. Also, the elapsed time increase linearly with table size. > However, I do not know if elapsed time I’m getting is to be expected. > Table reltuples in pg_class = 2,266,649,344 (pretty close) > Query = select count(*) from jim.sttyations ; > Elapsed time (ET) = 18.5 hrs That's pretty awful. My recollection is that in recent PG releases, SELECT COUNT(*) runs at something on the order of 100ns/row given an all-in-memory table. Evidently you're rather badly I/O bound. > This is an Aurora cluster running on r4.2xlarge (8 vCPU, 61g). Don't know much about Aurora, but I wonder whether you paid for guaranteed (provisioned) IOPS, and if so what service level. > refpep-> select count(*) from jim.sttyations; > QUERY PLAN > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ > Aggregate (cost=73451291.77..73451291.78 rows=1 width=8) > Output: count(*) > -> Index Only Scan using stty_indx_fk03 on jim.sttyations (cost=0.58..67784668.41 rows=2266649344 width=0) > Output: vsr_number > (4 rows) Oh, hmm ... the 100ns figure I mentioned was for a seqscan. IOS could be a lot worse for a number of reasons, foremost being that if the table isn't mostly all-visible then it'd involve a lot of random heap access. It might be interesting to try forcing a seqscan plan (see enable_indexscan). regards, tom lane
