Re: how to improve the performance of creating index - Mailing list pgsql-performance

Please keep the list cc'd so that others can help.

Yinan Li wrote:
> What version of Postgres are you using?
> 8.2.4
> How much RAM does the box have?
> 2G
> How big is the table?
> 256M tuples, each tuple contains 2 integers.
> How long does the index build take?
> About 2 hours
> What kind of an I/O system do you have?
> A SATA disk (7200 rpm)

2 hours does sound like a very long time. With a table like that, we're
talking about ~7-9 GB worth of data if I did the math right.

You could try lowering shared_buffers to something like 50 MB while you
build the index, to leave more RAM available for OS caching.

--
  Heikki Linnakangas
  EnterpriseDB   http://www.enterprisedb.com