On Monday May 10 2004 11:37, Ed L. wrote: > On Friday May 7 2004 12:48, Tom Lane wrote: > > "Ed L." <pgsql@bluepolka.net> writes: > > > 2) Would this low setting of 10000 explain the behavior we saw of > > > seqscans of a perfectly analyzed table with 1000 rows requiring > > > ridiculous amounts of time even after we cutoff the I/O load? > > > > Possibly. The undersized setting would cause leakage of disk space > > (that is, new rows get appended to the end of the table even when space > > is available within the table, because the system has "forgotten" about > > that space due to lack of FSM slots to remember it in). If the > > physical size of the table file gets large enough, seqscans will take a > > long time no matter how few live rows there are. I don't recall now > > whether your VACUUM VERBOSE results showed that the physical table size > > (number of pages) was out of proportion to the actual number of live > > rows. But it sure sounds like that might have been the problem. > > If it were indeed the case that we'd leaked a lot of diskspace, then > after bumping max_fsm_pages up to a much higher number (4M), will these > pages gradually be "remembered" as they are accessed by autovac and or > queried, etc? Or is a dump/reload or 'vacuum full' the only way? Trying > to avoid downtime... I mean, I see that our VACUUM (not full) does appear to be truncating and reducing the number of pages in some cases. Is that possible? If so, just thinking a DB restart will be much less complicated than dropping/reloading the individual table. VACUUM FULL has always been way too slow for our purposes, not sure why. TIA. ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 6: Have you searched our list archives? http://archives.postgresql.org