On Mon, 23 Feb 2009, Scott Marlowe wrote:
well that's pretty normal as the indexes grow large enough to not fit in cache, then not fit in memory, etc...
Right, the useful thing to do in this case is to take a look at how big all the relations (tables, indexes) involved are at each of the steps in the process. The script at http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Disk_Usage will show you that. That will give some feedback on whether the vacuum/reindex methodology is really doing what you expect, and it will also let you compare the size of the table/index with how much RAM is in the system.
Have you done any tuning of the postgresql.conf file? If you haven't increased shared_buffers substantially, you could be seeing buffer cache churn as the CPU spends all its time shuffling buffers between PostgreSQL and the OS once the working set involved exceeds around 32MB.
Shouldn't someone have ranted about RAID-5 by this point in the thread? -- * Greg Smith gsmith@xxxxxxxxxxxxx http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD -- Sent via pgsql-general mailing list (pgsql-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-general
