Bill Moran <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> In response to Tom Lane <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
>> Can you describe the usage pattern of that index?  I'm curious why it
>> doesn't maintain reasonably static size.  How often is the underlying
>> table vacuumed?
> ...
> There are 21 jobs, each ranging in size from 2000 - 5000 files.  Each job
> runs twice a day.  So you're looking at about 60,000 new rows at midnight
> and 60,000 new rows at noon each day.  With the purge cycle, about the
> same number of rows are being deleted as are being added, so the table
> size stays pretty constant.
> ...
> Note that the index under discussion is the only one in this database that
> shows significant bloat.

Yeah, and there's no obvious reason in what you say why this one should
bloat either.  Can you say anything about the distribution of the index
columns --- are you working with a fairly static set of filenameids, or
does that change over time?  How about the pathids?  How does the
combination of filenameid x pathid behave?

A bit of quick arithmetic says that the minimum possible size of that
index (at 100% fill factor) would be about 20K pages.  What you showed
us was that it had expanded to 40-some K pages, or a bit under 50% fill
factor.  This is low but not totally out of line; the traditional rule
of thumb is that the steady state fill factor will be about 2/3rds for a
heavily updated btree.  If you leave it go, does it continue to get
larger, or stay around 40K?

                        regards, tom lane

---------------------------(end of broadcast)---------------------------
TIP 4: Have you searched our list archives?

               http://archives.postgresql.org/

Reply via email to