Re: Any advice tuning this query ?

On Fri, Nov 11, 2016 at 7:19 AM, Henrik Ekenberg <henrik(at)ekenberg(dot)pw> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I have a select moving around a lot of data and takes times
> Any advice tuning this query ?
>
> EXPLAIN (ANALYZE ON, BUFFERS ON)
>

When accessing lots of data, sometimes the act of collecting timing on all
of the actions makes the query take >2x times longer, or more, and distorts
the timings it collects.

Try running the same query like:

EXPLAIN (ANALYZE ON, BUFFERS ON, timing off)

If the Execution times are very similar either way, then you don't have
this problem. But if they differ, then you can't depend on the results of
the timings reported when timing is turned on. Large sorts are
particularly subject to this problem.

More than half the time (if the times are believable) goes to scanning the
index activations_books_date. You might be better off with a sort rather
than an index scan. You can test this by doing:

begin;
drop index activations_books_date;
<explain your query here>;
rollback;

Don't do that on production server, as it will block other access to the
table for the duration.

You might also benefit from hash joins/aggregates, but you would have to
set work_mem to a very large value get them. I'd start by setting work_mem
in your session to 1TB, and seeing if that changes the explain plan (just
explain, not explain analyze!). If that supports the hash
joins/aggregates, then keeping lowering work_mem until you find the minimum
that supports the hash plans. Then ponder if it is safe to use that much
work_mem "for real" given your RAM and level of concurrent access.

Cheers,

Jeff