Re: postgresql performace degrading after a while

First of all thanks for you quick and efficient response.

Indeed I forgot to mention that I AM vacuuming the database using a
daemon every few hours; however this seems not to be the issue this
time, as when the CPU consumptions went up I tried to vacuum manually
and this seemed to take no affect.

As for the version, I am aware of the most recent versions and the next
version of the application will be certified with postgresql 8.1.x,
however the behavior I mentioned occurred on a live site in which making
changes is not simple. I will do it if I have no choice but I would be
happy if there is any workaround to hold the server for a while until
the ordinary upgrade occurs.

Thanks again.

-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Fuhr [mailto:mike(at)fuhr(dot)org]
Sent: Monday, January 30, 2006 9:17 AM
To: Ron Marom
Cc: pgsql-general(at)postgresql(dot)org
Subject: Re: [GENERAL] postgresql performace degrading after a while

On Mon, Jan 30, 2006 at 09:02:24AM +0200, Ron Marom wrote:
> I seem to have a problem with postgresql 7.4.2 running on Red Hat
> Enterprise Linux ES3.

If you can't upgrade to 8.0 or 8.1 then at least consider using the
latest version in the 7.4 branch (7.4.11). You're missing almost
two years of bug fixes.

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/7.4/static/release.html

> I am running an application server over a database in which tables
> contains at most a few thousands of records. The problematic table,
> however, contains 67 records, with an application daemon updating
> all those records every 30 seconds.

Are you vacuuming that table frequently? If not then it's accumulating
a lot of dead tuples, which would cause performance to degrade.

Are you vacuuming at all? See "Routine Database Maintenance Tasks"
in the documentation for an explanation of what it is and why it's
necessary.

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/7.4/static/maintenance.html

--
Michael Fuhr