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Subject: Re: postgres configuration
From: Scott Marlowe <smarlowe@g2switchworks.com>
To: Sumeet <asumeet@gmail.com>
Cc: Andrej Ricnik-Bay <andrej.groups@gmail.com>,
	PostgreSQL <pgsql-sql@postgresql.org>
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On Tue, 2007-03-13 at 15:48, Sumeet wrote:

> On 3/13/07, Andrej Ricnik-Bay <andrej.groups@gmail.com> wrote:
>         On 3/14/07, Sumeet <asumeet@gmail.com> wrote:
>         > Hi All,
>         Hi,
>         
>         > Sorry if this is the wrong list to ask this question.
>         General woould have been better :)
>         
>         > My Vacuum's are running very very slow and expecially when
>         vacuuming indexes
>         > in large tables of size in 5-10 gigabytes,
>         > can some one help me determine the parameters for
>         postgres.conf which will 
>         > help me vacuum fast. I'm running postgres on a server with
>         32 gigs of ram
>         > and 8 processors.
>         And the disk subsystem is .... ?
>         
>         The only info i have is
> 
> Apple xRaid drive array with 14 400GB drives for a total of 5 TB
> storage
> I have around 10-15 indexes for each tables. does the number of
> indexes slow down the vacuum process?
> indexes are compund indexes on multiple fields. 

Yes, indexes have to be vacuumed, and compound fields tend to get larger
at a geomtric rate as you add columns.

Apple XRaids have gotten some pretty "meh" reviews in the past.  Does
this one have battery backed caching? (a good thing) Is it configured as
RAID-5 (a not so good thing)

If so, can you reconfigure it as RAID1+0 or do you need every terabyte
of storage you can get?