On Tue, 2024-01-30 at 11:40 +0200, Pavlos Kallis wrote: > I have the following table: > > CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS public.shortened_url > ( > id character varying(12) COLLATE pg_catalog."default" NOT NULL, > created_at timestamp without time zone, > expires_at timestamp without time zone, > url text COLLATE pg_catalog."default" NOT NULL, > CONSTRAINT shortened_url_pkey PRIMARY KEY (id) > ) > > The table contains only the following index on PRIMARY KEY: > > CREATE UNIQUE INDEX IF NOT EXISTS shortened_url_pkey > ON public.shortened_url USING btree > (id COLLATE pg_catalog."default" ASC NULLS LAST) > TABLESPACE pg_default; > > This table has approximately 5 million rows of expired URLs (expires_at < now()), and 5 thousand rows of non-expired URLs (expires_at > now()) > > I deleted all expired URLs with this query: > > DELETE FROM shortened_url WHERE expires_at < now(). > > Then, I tried to query the table for expired URLs: > > SELECT * FROM shortened_url WHERE expires_at < now(); > > This query was very slow. It took around 1-2 minutes to run, while it had to fetch only 5000 rows (the non-expired URLs, since the other ones were deleted). > > After that, I tried to run VACUUM ANALYZE and REINDEX to the table. > The query was still slow. > > Finally, I ran VACUUM FULL and re-executed the query. Only then, it started running fast (1-2 seconds). > > Do you have observed a similar behavior with VACUUM ANALYZE / VACUUM FULL and why this can happen? > Is this because data is compacted after VACUUM FULL and sequential disk reads are faster? > Shouldn't VACUUM ANALYZE reclaim the disk space and make the query run fast? > Is this because RDS might do some magic? Is it something I am missing? There are too many unknowns here. Please enable "track_io_timing" and send us the output of EXPLAIN (ANALYZE, BUFFERS) for the slow statements. One theory could be that there was a long running transaction or something else that prevented VACUUM from cleaning up. For that, the output of "VACUUM (VERBOSE) shortened_url" would be interesting. > Additional details > PostgreSQL version: 14.7 on db.t3.micro RDS > PG configuration: Default of RDS We can only speak about real PostgreSQL... Yours, Laurenz Albe
