Thread: Vacuum takes for ever

Hello everyone,
in a substantial multi location development project we are using PG to
create a large information system. 
After having loaded data in the order of one million records a vaccum took
50h of CPU time on a 350MHz PII (RedHat 5.2, pg 6.4.2). There were no
deletes or anyting like that.

What does vaccum do that takes so long and is there a way to speed this up?

greetings


Eildert Groeneveld
=========================================
Institute for
Animal Science and Animal Behaviour
Mariensee 31535 Neustadt Germany
Tel   : (49)(0)5034 871155
Fax   : (49)(0)5034 92579
www   : http://www.tzv.fal.de/~eg/ 
e-mail: eg@tzv.fal.de
=========================================

Hello everyone,
  in a substantial multi location development project we are using PG  to create a large information system.  After
havingloaded data in  the order of one million records a vaccum took 50h of CPU time on a  350MHz PII (RedHat 5.2, pg
6.4.2).There were no deletes or anyting  like that.
 

I made a test database when I was deciding whether PostgreSQL was
going to be up to the task.  It just so happens that it had a million
records in it as well.  The first vacuum took a very very long time,
subsequent vacuums, however, took much less time.
  What does vaccum do that takes so long and is there a way to speed  this up?

Apparently it does some "database stuff."  Yikes, someone else will
have to answer that question.  I just know how to get data in and out
of PostgreSQL.

Jason Earl

> What does vaccum do that takes so long and is there a way to speed this up?

Not sure. Try dropping indices if you have any on that table...
                   - Thomas

-- 
Thomas Lockhart                lockhart@alumni.caltech.edu
South Pasadena, California