Re: Query is slow when order by and limit clause are used in the query

On Mon, May 24, 2021 at 04:19:01PM +0530, sreekanth vajrapu wrote:
> Hi Team,
>
> We are having a slow query issue for one of our applications. We are seeing
> slowness(5 seconds) when we use both ORDER BY and LIMIT 30 clause whereas
> the same query is performing very good(200 MS) when using only ORDER BY
> clause. Also note that the query performed very fast(200 MS) when we
> increased LIMIT to 100 along with ORDER BY.
>
> Can you please help us if there are any bugs related to this? OR Can
> someone kindly provide some solution to this issue?

This is not at base a bug. Instead, it's a behavior which compliance
with the SQL standard mandates. You're doing pagination, and
unfortunately you're doing it in a way that, while it appears simple
and intuitive, guarantees poor performance for later pages.

Here's a concise description of the fundamental problem you're
encountering along with some suggestions as to how to do this more
efficiently, i.e. faster consistently.

https://use-the-index-luke.com/no-offset

Here are some more references on pagination and how to do it
efficiently:

http://www.depesz.com/2007/08/29/better-results-paging-in-postgresql-82/
https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/File:Pagination_Done_the_PostgreSQL_Way.pdf
https://coderwall.com/p/lkcaag
https://www.citusdata.com/blog/2016/03/30/five-ways-to-paginate/
https://ask.use-the-index-luke.com/questions/205/how-to-query-for-previous-page-with-keyset-pagination

Best,
David.
--
David Fetter <david(at)fetter(dot)org> http://fetter.org/
Phone: +1 415 235 3778

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