Re: Explain analyze time overhead

On 05-12-13 15:09, salah jubeh wrote:
>
> Hello guys,
>
> When I excute a query, the exection time is about 1 minute; however,
> when I execute the query with explain analyze the excution time jumps
> to 10 minutes.
> I have tried this for several queries, where I need to optimize; and
> using explain analyze leads alway to a huge time overhead in factor of 10.
>
> This is a little bit starnge for me; did any one experience somthing
> like this? Can I trust the generated plans?
>
> Regards

Explain analyze does a lot more work than just explaining the query, it
excecutes it and takes not of how long things actually took, which
itself takes time. Apparently on some machines, it can take much longer
than just executing the query would take.

From the manual:
"In order to measure the run-time cost of each node in the execution
plan, the current implementation ofEXPLAIN ANALYZEadds profiling
overhead to query execution. As a result, runningEXPLAIN ANALYZEon a
query can sometimes take significantly longer than executing the query
normally. The amount of overhead depends on the nature of the query, as
well as the platform being used. The worst case occurs for plan nodes
that in themselves require very little time per execution, and on
machines that have relatively slow operating system calls for obtaining
the time of day."