Re: Random penalties on GIN index updates?

Tom Lane wrote:
> jesper(at)krogh(dot)cc writes:
>> If i understand the technicalities correct then INSERT/UPDATES to the
>> index will be accumulated in the "maintainance_work_mem" and the "user"
>> being unlucky to fill it up will pay the penalty of merging all the
>> changes into the index?
>
> You can turn off the "fastupdate" index parameter to disable that,
> but I think there may be a penalty in index bloat as well as insertion
> speed. It would be better to use a more conservative work_mem
> (work_mem, not maintenance_work_mem, is what limits the amount of stuff
> accumulated during normal inserts).

Ok, I read the manual about that. Seems worth testing, hat I'm seeing is
stuff like this:

2009-10-21T16:32:21
2009-10-21T16:32:25
2009-10-21T16:32:30
2009-10-21T16:32:35
2009-10-21T17:10:50
2009-10-21T17:10:59
2009-10-21T17:11:09
... then it went on steady for another 180.000 documents.

Each row is a printout from the application doing INSERTS, it print the
time for each 1000 rows it gets through. It is the 38minutes in the
middle I'm a bit worried about.

work_mem is set to 512MB, that may translate into 180.000 documents in
my system?

What I seems to miss a way to make sure som "background" application is
the one getting the penalty, so a random user doing a single insert
won't get stuck. Is that doable?

It also seems to lock out other inserts while being in this state.

--
Jesper