Received: from localhost (unknown [200.46.204.183]) by mail.postgresql.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 75DD063309E for ; Fri, 13 Feb 2009 13:20:24 -0400 (AST) Received: from mail.postgresql.org ([200.46.204.86]) by localhost (mx1.hub.org [200.46.204.183]) (amavisd-maia, port 10024) with ESMTP id 06690-01 for ; Fri, 13 Feb 2009 13:20:06 -0400 (AST) X-Greylist: from auto-whitelisted by SQLgrey-1.7.6 Received: from smtp-relay.musicreports.com (unknown [207.47.100.34]) by mail.postgresql.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 4FB6663308D for ; Fri, 13 Feb 2009 13:20:03 -0400 (AST) Received: from [192.168.21.220] (unknown [192.168.21.220]) by smtp-relay.musicreports.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 7CD7EF3EC3 for ; Fri, 13 Feb 2009 09:20:01 -0800 (PST) Message-ID: <4995ABC0.4090401@musicreports.com> Date: Fri, 13 Feb 2009 09:20:00 -0800 From: Roger Ging User-Agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.19 (Windows/20081209) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: pgsql-admin@postgresql.org Subject: Vacuum wait time problem Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Virus-Scanned: Maia Mailguard 1.0.1 X-Spam-Status: No, hits=0.1 tagged_above=0 required=5 tests=RDNS_NONE=0.1 X-Spam-Level: X-Archive-Number: 200902/87 X-Sequence-Number: 31308 Hi, I'm running vacuum full analyze verbose on a table with 20million rows and 11 indexes. In top, I'm seeing [pdflush] and postgres: writer process each using diferent cpu cores, with wait time well above 90% on each of them. The vacuum has been running for several hours, and the last thing to show on screen, over an hour ago, was : DETAIL: 8577281 index row versions were removed. 736 index pages have been deleted, 736 are currently reusable. CPU 7.57s/52.52u sec elapsed 381.70 sec. That's the last index The vacuum process itself is using less than 2% of a core. The pg version is 8.3.1 running on Suse. Hardware is 2X dual core Opterons, 16 GB RAM, 24 drives in RAID 50 It would seem to me that the system is extremely IO bound, but I don't know how to find out what specifically is wrong here. Any advice greatly appreciated. -- Roger Ging --