>
> > On the other hand, if I do a count(*) on '^ric', his takes consequently
> > around 1:30 mins, no matter how often I run it. This returns 7866.
> >
> > A search on count(*) of '^lling' and '^tones' takes around 2.5 secs after
> > running it several times.
>
> Since postgres will still read the data row (even for this count(*)) I would guess,
> that this is a data distribution problem. Maybe you could cluster your data ?
> Maybe the '^rol' rows stick pretty much together, whilst the '^ric' rows
> are evenly distributed on all datapages. Of course there would be room
> for improvement if postgresql would not read the data pages, which are not needed
> for any query that only selects columns that are part of the index.
>
Brilliant. I had forgotten that the data pages are accessed as well as
the index pages. The CLUSTER command works in 6.3, so perhaps that will
change some times.
--
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