Re: Inserting slows down

OK, I've investigated further a bit, and made some charts out of the
insert speed.

It looks like it is fluctuating in a very wide range even when it works
fast in average, and there's no "progressive" slow-down visible, it's
more like a sudden drop in average speed at one point. Note that even
after the average speed drops there are still pikes of high speed for
short periods.

That makes me think if this is not really dependent somehow on the data
itself ? Is it possible that updating the b-tree indexes is heavily
dependent on the ordering/randomness of the keys ? In this case is there
any way I could order the incoming data so that index update performance
is optimal ? Or may the server not optimally be tuned and I should look
in some tuning ?

TIA,
Csaba.

On Mon, 2005-09-19 at 11:18, Csaba Nagy wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I am running a data import in a Postgres 8.0.1 data base. The target
> table is one with ~ 100 million rows. The imported data is around 40
> million rows. The import is inserting 10000 rows per transaction. The
> table has a few indexes on it, a few foreign constraints, and one insert
> trigger which normally inserts a row in another table for each insert on
> this one, but for the duration of the data transfer it was modified to
> not insert anything for the data which is transfered, but it does an
> extra lookup on the index of a ~ 10000 big table to get the exclusion
> condition.
>
> Given this context, at transfer start I've had a transfer rate at ~ 1,3
> million rows per hour, which dropped progressively to ~ 300000 now after
> transferring ~ 24 million rows.
>
> My question is what could cause this progressive slow-down ? I would
> have expected a more or less constant transfer rate, as the table was
> not empty in the first place to say that the indexes slow down as they
> grow... so after a growth of ~ 20% I have a slow-down for inserts of
> more than 4 times. What should I suspect here ? I can't just drop the
> indexes/foreign keys/triggers, the db is in production use.
>
> TIA for any ideas,
> Csaba.
>
>
>
> ---------------------------(end of broadcast)---------------------------
> TIP 9: In versions below 8.0, the planner will ignore your desire to
> choose an index scan if your joining column's datatypes do not
> match