On Fri, Sep 05, 2008 at 09:16:41AM -0400, Aaron Burnett wrote:
> For an upcoming release there is a 16 million row insert that on our test
> cluster takes about 2.5 hours to complete with all indices dropped
> beforehand.
>
> If I turn off fsync, it completes in under 10 minutes.
Have you tried bundling all the INSERT statements into a single
transaction? If you haven't then PG will run each statement in its own
transaction and then commit each INSERT statement to disk separately,
incurring large overheads.
Sam