Hello, I have been a happy postgresql developer for a few years now. Recently I have discovered a very strange phenomenon in regards to inserting rows.
My app inserts millions of records a day, averaging about 30 rows a second. I use autovac to make sure my stats and indexes are up to date. Rarely are rows ever deleted. Each day a brand new set of tables is created and eventually the old tables are dropped. The app calls functions which based on some simple logic perform the correct inserts. The problem I am seeing is that after a particular database gets kinda old, say a couple of months, performance begins to degrade. Even after creating brand new tables my insert speed is slow in comparison ( by a magnitude of 5 or more ) with a brand new schema which has the exact same tables. I am running on an IBM 360 dual processor Linux server with a 100 gig raid array spanning 5 scsi disks. The machine has 1 gig of ram of which 500 meg is dedicated to Postgresql. Just to be clear, the question I have is why would a brand new db schema allow inserts faster than an older schema with brand new tables? Since the tables are empty to start, vacuuming should not be an issue at all. Each schema is identical in every way except the db name and creation date. Any ideas are appreciated. Thanks, T.R. Missner ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 9: the planner will ignore your desire to choose an index scan if your joining column's datatypes do not match