Maxim Boguk <maxim.boguk@gmail.com> writes: > On the one of databases under my support I found very curious case of the > almost endless index bloat (index size stabilises around 100x of the > original size).
> The table have 5 indexes and they all have the same bloating behaviour > (growth to almost 100x and stabilisation around that amount). An original > index size 4-8Mb (after manual reindex), over time of the 5 days they all > monotonically growth to 300-900MB. In the same time table size staying > pretty constant at 30-50Mb (and amount of rows in the same don't vary > widely and stays between 200k and 500k).
At least for the index you gave stats for, it seems like it's stabilizing at one index entry per page. This is a known possible pathological behavior if the application's usage involves heavy decimation of original entries; say, you insert sequential timestamps and then later remove all but every one-thousandth one, leaving at most one live entry on every index page. Btree can recover the totally-empty leaf pages but it has no provision for merging non-empty leaf pages, so those all stay as they are indefinitely.
It would be pretty unusual for all the indexes on a table to be used like that, though.
regards, tom lane
Thank you very much for an explanation.
This table are part of the complicated 3-tables session info structure with a lot of short living sessions and some very long living.
And most used id's are bigserials. So yet every index field on that table have the same bad behaviour.
