Re: Sort performance on large tables

Stephan,

On 11/8/05 9:38 AM, "Stephan Szabo" <sszabo(at)megazone(dot)bigpanda(dot)com> wrote:

>> >
>> > Just as we find with a similar comparison (with a "popular commercial,
>> > proprietary database" :-) Though some might suggest you increase
>> > work_mem or other tuning suggestions to speed sorting, none work. In
>> > fact, we find that increasing work_mem actually slows sorting slightly.
>
> I wish you'd qualify your statements, because I can demonstrably show that
> I can make sorts go faster on my machine at least by increasing work_mem
> under some conditions.
>
Cool ­ can you provide your test case please? I¹ll ask our folks to do the
same, but as I recall we did some pretty thorough testing and found that it
doesn¹t help. Moreover, the conclusion was that the current algorithm isn¹t
designed to use memory effectively.

Recognize also that we¹re looking for a factor of 10 or more improvement
here ­ this is not a small increase that¹s needed.

- Luke