Poor Delete performance

  I am having some performance issues with deletion.

  It appears that in deleting records from a table with a significant
  number or rows ( in this case 1.3 million ) it takes about 1 hour per
  100K rows deleted if deleting more then 400K at a time.  This sounds
  way to slow to me.  If I break it up into smaller deletes then I can
  usually get about 5K rows per minute, but even that seems awfully slow
  to me.

  The machine is a pretty beefy box ( PIII 800Mhz, 256M, SCSI III )
  and is basically doing nothing else.  When performing the delete the
  system goes to 100% utilization ( >95% is postmaster ) and stays that
  way until the delete finishes.  My guess is that the overhead of MVCC
  tracking all of the rows deleted so that a rollback can be performed
  is killing me here, but I can see no way to get around it.

  I have searched the on-line archives for all the postgres lists and
  checked the FAQ and I can't find anything that gives any insight into
  increasing delete performance.

  Any information whatsoever would be greatly appreciated.

--
Bill

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