Re: slow joins?

Julien Cigar <jcigar(at)ulb(dot)ac(dot)be> wrote:

> try to increase cpu_tuple_cost to 0.1

I agree that's on the right track, but possibly an overly blunt
tool for the job.  The following settings are likely to need
adjustment, IMO:

effective_cache_size: People often set this to somewhere in the
range of 50% to 75% of the RAM on the machine.  This setting does
not allocate RAM, but tells the planner how likely it is to find
things in cache for, say, repeated index access.  A higher setting
makes the random access involved in index scans seem like less of a
problem.

random_page_cost: You seem to have a very high cache hit ratio,
between shared_buffers and the OS cache.  To model this you should
decrease random_page_cost to something just above seq_page_cost or
equal to it.  To reflect the relatively low cost of reading a page
from the OS cache (compared to actually reading from disk) you
might want to reduce both of these below 1.  0.1 is a not-uncommon
setting for instances with the active portion of the database
well-cached.

cpu_tuple_cost: I always raise this; I think our default is just
too low to accurately model the cost of reading a row, compared to
the cost factors used for other things.  In combination with the
above changes I've never had to go beyond 0.03 to get a good plan.
I've pushed it to 0.05 to see if that put me near a tipping point
for a bad plan, and saw no ill effects.  I've never tried higher
than 0.05, so I can't speak to that.

In any event, your current cost settings aren't accurately modeling
actual costs in your environment for your workload.  You need to
adjust them.

One of the estimates was off, so increasing the statistics sample
size might help, but I suspect that you need to make adjustments
like the above in any event.

--
Kevin Grittner
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company