Re: slow bitmap heap scans on pg 9.2

On Wed, Apr 10, 2013 at 11:56:32AM -0400, Steve Singer wrote:
> On 13-04-10 09:56 AM, ktm(at)rice(dot)edu wrote:
> >On Wed, Apr 10, 2013 at 09:49:55AM -0400, Steve Singer wrote:
>
> >
> >Hi Steve,
> >
> >The one thing that stands out to me is that you are working with 200GB of
> >data on a machine with 4-8GB of ram and you have the random_page_cost set
> >to 2.0. That is almost completely uncached and I would expect a value of
> >10 or more to be closer to reality.
>
> Setting random_page_cost to 15 makes the planner choose the
> nested-loop plan (at least the date range I tried).
>
> I thought that the point of effective cache size was to tell the
> planner high likely it is for a random page to be in cache. With
> 200GB of data for this query and an effective cache size of 3.5 GB I
> would have expected that to be accounted for.
>
For random_page_cost to be that low, the database would need to be
mostly cached. 3.5GB is almost 100X too small to do that unless your
query exhibits a large amount of locality of reference. Values for
random_page_cost between 10 and 20 are very reasonable for disk-bound
I/O scenarios.

Regards,
Ken