Damon Hart <dhcom@sundial.com> writes:
> I am experiencing continually degrading performance on queries run
> against the special system tables. I notice the slowdown when these
> meta-data queries are run implicitly "behind the scenes" such as when
> psql with readline support tries to complete a table name or pg_admin
> retrieves table column info to populate the GUI headers. Performance
> picked up dramatically when I had to dump/restore this weekend.
> ... several update
> processes are constantly contributing new data by way of creating and
> dropping temporary tables
It sounds to me like you aren't keeping up housekeeping adequately.
You need to be sure that the system catalogs are vacuumed often enough
and that your FSM settings are large enough to keep track of all the
free space. These are not different considerations from avoiding bloat
in user tables and indexes --- see the archives for plenty of discussion.
regards, tom lane