On Mon, 28 Jul 2008, Faludi Gábor wrote:
EXPLAIN ANALYZE SELECT DISTINCT letoltes.cid, count(letoltes.cid)  AS
elofordulas FROM letoltes GROUP BY cid ORDER BY elofordulas DESC LIMIT 5;
                                                              QUERY PLAN
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Limit  (cost=9255.05..9255.09 rows=5 width=4) (actual  time=604.734..604.743 > 
rows=5 loops=1)
  ->  Unique  (cost=9255.05..9257.26 rows=294 width=4) (actual 
time=604.732..604.737 rows=5 loops=1)
        ->  Sort  (cost=9255.05..9255.79 rows=294 width=4) (actual 
time=604.730..604.732 rows=5 loops=1)
              Sort Key: count(cid), cid
              ->  HashAggregate  (cost=9242.26..9243.00 rows=294 width=4) 
(actual time=604.109..604.417 rows=373 loops=1)
                    ->  Seq Scan on letoltes  (cost=0.00..6920.51 rows=464351 
width=4) (actual time=0.022..281.413 rows=464351 loops=1)
Total runtime: 604.811 ms

So this query is doing a sequential scan of the letoltes table for each query. You may get some improvement by creating an index on cid and clustering on that index, but probably not much.

Moving to Postgres 8.3 will probably help a lot, as it will allow multiple queries to use the same sequential scan in parallel. That's assuming the entire table isn't in cache.

Another solution would be to create an additional table that contains the results of this query, and keep it up to date using triggers on the original table. Then query that table instead.

However, probably the best solution is to examine the problem and work out if you can alter the application to make it avoid doing such an expensive query so often. Perhaps it could cache the results.

Matthew

--
Psychotics are consistently inconsistent. The essence of sanity is to
be inconsistently inconsistent.
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