statement_timeout problem

Somehow my previous message got grouped into the Amazon EC2 thread..

I have a problem with fetching from cursors sometimes taking an
extremely long time to run. I am attempting to use the
statement_timeout parameter to limit the runtime on these.

PostgreSQL 8.2.4
Linux 2.6.22.14-72.fc6 #1 SMP Wed Nov 21 13:44:07 EST 2007 i686 i686
i386 GNU/Linux

begin;
set search_path = testdb;
declare cur_rep cursor for select * from accounts, individual;

set statement_timeout = 1000;

fetch forward 1000000 from cur_rep;

The open join, 1000ms, and 1000000 count are all intentional - just
trying to figure out what's going on here. Normally those values would
be 300000 and 10000. The accounts and individual tables have around
100 fields and 500k records each.

Nested Loop (cost=21992.28..8137785497.71 rows=347496704100 width=8)
-> Seq Scan on accounts (cost=0.00..30447.44 rows=623844 width=8)
-> Materialize (cost=21992.28..29466.53 rows=557025 width=0)
-> Seq Scan on individual (cost=0.00..19531.25 rows=557025
width=0)

Yes, the plan is insane but again, just trying to figure this out.

I tried moving the SET statment before the cursor delcaration and
outside the transaction with the same results. I thought possibly it
was getting bogged down in I/O but the timeout seems to work fine if not
using a cursor.

What am I missing here?

Thanks,
Joe

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