Since Pg does not use the concept of rollback segments, it is unclear why deletion produces so much disk IO (4GB).
With PostgreSQL's write-ahead log, MVCC and related commit log, and transactional DDL features, there's actually even more overhead that can be involved than a simple rollback segment design when you delete things:
There does not appear to be much WAL activity. Here's the insertion of 100 rows as seen by iotop: 4.39 G 0.00 % 9.78 % postgres: writer process 5.34 G 0.00 % 5.93 % postgres: postgr~0.5.93(1212) idle 27.84 M 0.00 % 1.77 % postgres: wal writer process 144.00 K 0.00 % 0.00 % postgres: stats collector process 0.00 B 0.00 % 0.00 % postgres: autova~ launcher process 0.00 B 0.00 % 0.00 % postgres: postgr~0.5.93(4632) idle
.. and the deletion: 288.18 M 0.00 % 37.80 % postgres: writer process 3.41 G 0.00 % 19.76 % postgres: postgr~0.5.93(1212) DELETE 27.27 M 0.00 % 3.18 % postgres: wal writer process 72.00 K 0.00 % 0.03 % postgres: stats collector process 0.00 B 0.00 % 0.00 % postgres: autova~ launcher process 0.00 B 0.00 % 0.00 % postgres: postgr~0.5.93(4632) idle
So, the original 1.9 GB of useful data generate about 10GB of IO, 5 of which end up being written to the disk The deletion generates about 3.8 GB of IO all of which results in disk IO. WAL activity is about 27MB in both cases.
I read all of the above, but it does not really clarify why deletion generates so much IO.
One fun thing to try here is to increase shared_buffers and checkpoint_segments, then see if the total number of writes go down. The defaults for both are really low, which makes buffer page writes that might otherwise get combined as local memory changes instead get pushed constantly to disk.
-- Greg Smith 2ndQuadrant US Baltimore, MD PostgreSQL Training, Services and Support greg@2ndQuadrant.com www.2ndQuadrant.us
