On Friday 22 July 2005 15:23, Michael Fuhr pondered: > Did you run VACUUM ANALYZE or just ANALYZE? Could we see the output > of VACUUM ANALYZE VERBOSE speed? I just ran a plain ANALYZE then. When I VACUUM ANALYZE the table the (inferior) sequential scan strategy is still chosen over the index scan. Here is the output of VACUUM ANALYZE VERBOSE speed (second VACUUM ANALYZE): INFO: vacuuming "public.speed" INFO: index "speed_pkey" now contains 13959950 row versions in 53283 pages DETAIL: 0 index pages have been deleted, 0 are currently reusable. CPU 3.73s/0.57u sec elapsed 258.89 sec. INFO: "speed": found 0 removable, 13959950 nonremovable row versions in 68138 pages DETAIL: 0 dead row versions cannot be removed yet. There were 0 unused item pointers. 0 pages are entirely empty. CPU 5.50s/1.32u sec elapsed 365.29 sec. INFO: analyzing "public.speed" INFO: "speed": 68138 pages, 3000 rows sampled, 13900152 estimated total rows VACUUM > What are the values of other relevant settings, like shared_buffers, > effective_cache_size, and cpu_index_tuple_cost? How much memory > does this system have? shared_buffers, effective_cache_size and cpu_index_tuple_cost all have their default values of 1000, 1000 and 0.001 respectively. From their descriptions I gather that's reasonable and I don't know how I would optimise these for my system (I cannot find any hints in the documentation). It has 512MB of RAM, Pentium M 1.5Ghz, but is used as a desktop system (KDE) with the database sitting on an external 7200rpm USB 2.0 harddisk for space reasons. > > relname | relkind | reltuples | relpages > > ------------------+---------+-------------------+---------- > > speed | r | 1.39002e+07 | 68138 > > speed_pkey | i | 1000 | 1 > > That's odd -- why aren't there more tuples and pages in the speed_pkey > index? Those look like never-been-vacuumed defaults. Are you sure > you've been vacuuming this table, or have you just been analyzing it? I also noticed that. I didn't realise that a plain ANALYZE wouldn't update the stats of the index, only a VACUUM ANALYZE seems to take care of that (why isn't this documented?). As I said above, this seems to make no difference. > How much update/delete activity does this table undergo? It's a low usage table/database, I'm its only user (not really production) and insertion happens infrequently (only in the beginning of its lifetime) while queries of the type I posted constitute the bulk of the resource-intensive database usage. -- Kilian Hagemann Climate Systems Analysis Group University of Cape Town Republic of South Africa Tel(w): ++27 21 650 2748 ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 4: Have you searched our list archives? http://archives.postgresql.org