postgres materialized view refresh performance - Mailing list pgsql-general

There is a table t which is used in a mview mv, this is the only table in the mview definition.

create table t (c1 int, ..., c10 int);
-- there is a pk on say c1 column
create materialized view mv as select c1, c2...c10 from t;
---there is a unique index on say c5 and bunch of other indexes on the mview.

The reason there is a mview created instead of using table t, is that that the table gets truncated and reloaded every couple of hours and we don't want users to see an empty table at any point of time that's why mview is being used.

Using "refresh materialized view concurrently", this mview is being used by APIs and end users.

Couple of questions I have -

1. Whenever mview refresh concurrently happens, does pg create another set of table and indexes and switch it with the orig? If no, then does it update the existing data?
2. If the usage of mview is pretty heavy does it impact the performance of the refresh process? Vice-versa, if the refresh is going on does the performance of mview by users take a hit?
3. The mview gets refreshed in a couple of mins sometimes and sometimes it takes hours. When it runs for longer, there are no locks and no resource shortage, the number of recs in the base table is 6m (7.5gb) which is not huge so why does it take so long to refresh the mview?
4. Does mview need vacuum/analyze/reindex?