Re: Question about slow queries...

In response to Good, Thomas :
>
> Hi,
>
> I have a question about a query that starts out fine and over time
> slows to a halt - but only on a webhosted site. Locally it does fine.
>
> The query is a singleton select (no joins), hitting a table with about
> 5,000 records in it. Over time the query slows to a crawl and I have

Okay, about 5000 records.

> to dump and rebuild/repopulate to restore efficiency. Vacuum does
> nothing but a dump and reload fixes the problem and the query runs
> lightning fast again -- for a period of a week or so. As stated this

okay

>
> With everything working properly (table rebuilt just yesterday) explain analyze produces this on the webhost:
>
> Sort (cost=121547.89..121558.43 rows=4214 width=4620) (actual time=386.172..386.224 rows=89 loops=1)
> Sort Key: visit_date
> -> Seq Scan on client_service_note (cost=0.00..100334.19 rows=4214 width=4620) (actual time=0.019..385.917 rows=89 loops=1)
> Filter: (client_id = 385)
> Total runtime: 386.335 ms

Well, estimated rows= 4214, nealy the whole table.Because of this the
planner choose a seq-scan. But - real only 89 rows with this condition.

Again: estimated rows=4214, real rows=89. This is a big difference!

I think, you have a lot of dead tuples in this table - many updates
and/or deletes & inserts. You should check your vacuum-strategy.

Other reason, maybe, wrong statistics. You can try to increase
statistics target. (alter table ... ALTER [ COLUMN ] column SET
STATISTICS 100 or more)

>
> And locally:
>
> Sort (cost=535.82..536.04 rows=88 width=696) (actual time=2.140..2.156 rows=88 loops=1)
> Sort Key: visit_date
> Sort Method: quicksort Memory: 65kB
> -> Seq Scan on client_service_note (cost=0.00..532.98 rows=88 width=696) (actual time=0.014..1.988 rows=88 loops=1)
> Filter: (client_id = 385)
> Total runtime: 2.295 ms

Do you have an INDEX on client_id?

>
> My query is terse:
> SELECT * FROM client_service_note WHERE client_id = 385 ORDER BY visit_date DESC;
>
> Locally I'm running 8.4.2, the webhost is 8.1.18

There are many improvements between 8.1 and 8.4 ...

Andreas
--
Andreas Kretschmer
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