Re: insert/update tps slow with indices on table > 1M rows

On Wed, 04 Jun 2008 00:36:09 +0200, andrew klassen <aptklassen(at)yahoo(dot)com>
wrote:

> Running postgres 8.2.5
>  
> I have a table that has 5 indices, no foreign keys or any
> dependency on any other table. If delete the database and
> start entering entries, everything works very well until I get
> to some point (let's say 1M rows). Basically, I have a somewhat
> constant rate of inserts/updates that go into a work queue and then
> get passed to postgres. The work queue starts filling up as the
> responsiveness slows down. For example at 1.5M
> rows it takes >2 seconds for 300 inserts issued in one transaction.
>  
> Prior to this point I had added regular VACUUM ANALYZE on
> the table and it did help.  I increased maintenance work memory to
> 128M. I also set the fillfactor on the table indices to 50% (not sure
> if that made any difference have to study results more closely). 
>  
> In an effort to figure out the bottleneck, I DROPed 4 of the indices
> on the table and the tps increased to over 1000. I don't really know
> which index removal gave the best performance improvement. I
> dropped 2 32-bit indices and 2 text indices which all using btree.
>  
> The cpu load is not that high, i.e. plenty of idle cpu. I am running an
> older
> version of freebsd and the iostat output is not very detailed.
> During this time, the number is low < 10Mbs. The system has an
> LSI Logic MegaRAID controller with 2 disks.
>  
> Any ideas on how to find the bottleneck/decrease overhead of index usage.
>  
> Thanks.

If you are filling an empty table it is generally faster to create the
indexes after the data import.
Of course if this is a live table or you need the indexes during the
import, this is not an option.
I find it generally faster to lightly preprocess the data and generate
text files that I then import using COPY, then doing the rest of the
processing in SQL.

How much RAM in the box ? size of the data & indexes ?