Message-ID: <4F22E752.5000506@enterprisedb.com>
Date: Fri, 27 Jan 2012 20:05:06 +0200
From: Heikki Linnakangas <heikki.linnakangas@enterprisedb.com>
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To: Jon Nelson <jnelson+pgsql@jamponi.net>
CC: pgsql-performance@postgresql.org
Subject: Re: regarding CLUSTER and HUGE work_mem / maintenance_work_mem
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On 27.01.2012 19:43, Jon Nelson wrote:
> Let's say I have a 7GB table with 3-4 indices for a total of 10-12GB.
> Furthermore, let's say I have a machine with sufficient memory for me
> to set the work_mem  and maintenance_work_mem to 20GB (just for this
> session).
> When I issue a CLUSTER using one of the indices, I see PostgreSQL (by
> way of strace) performing an index scan which amounts to large
> quantities of random I/O.
> In my case, that means it takes a very, very long time. PostgreSQL is
> largely at defaults, except for a 2GB shared_buffers and a few
> unrelated changes. The system itself has 32GB of physical RAM and has
> plenty free.
> Why didn't PostgreSQL just read the table into memory (and the
> interesting index) as a sequential scan, sort, and then write it out?
> It seems like there would be more than enough memory for that. The
> sequential I/O rate on this machine is 50-100x the random I/O rate.
>
> I'm using 8.4.10 (with the 'inet' de-toasting patch) on Scientific Linux 6.1.

The suppport for doing a seqscan+sort in CLUSTER was introduced in 
version 9.1. Before that, CLUSTER always did an indexscan. See release 
notes: http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.1/static/release-9-1.html#AEN107416

-- 
   Heikki Linnakangas
   EnterpriseDB   http://www.enterprisedb.com