Re: very very slow inserts into very large table

On 16/07/12 14:37, Jon Nelson wrote:
> I have a single *table* that is some 560GB in size, 6 columns, average
> row width 63.
> There are approximately 6.1 billion rows.
> It has 4 indices, 131, 313, 131 and 190 GB in size, respectively. All
> are btree indices.
>
> I tried inserting new data into the table, and it's taking a *very* long time.
> I pre-built the data to be inserted into a temporary table with the
> exact same structure and column ordering, etc, and the temporary table
> is about 8.5GB in size with about 93 million rows.
> The temporary table was built in about 95 seconds.
> The insert has been going for 47 hours and 21 minutes, give or take.
> I'm not doing any correlation or filtering, etc --  straight up
> insert, literally "insert into big_table select * from
> the_temp_table;".
>
> vmstat output doesn't seem that useful, with disk wait being 10-15%
> and I/O speeds highly variable, from 5-20MB/s reads couple with
> 0-16MB/s writes, generally on the lower end of these.
> strace of the inserting process shows that it's basically hammering
> the disk in terms of random reads and infrequent writes.
> postgresql. It's not verifying, rebuilding, etc. While this process is
> active, streaming write I/O is terrible - 36MB/s. WIth it "paused"
> (via strace) I get 72MB/s.  (reads are 350MB/s).
>
> The OS is Scientific Linux 6.2, and the version of postgresql is 9.1.4
> - x86_64. There is nothing else of note happening on the box. The box
> is a quad CPU, dual-core each Xeon E5430  @ 2.66GHz with 32GB of RAM
> and a 3ware 9690 RAID 4TB RAID10 for the storage for
>
> What might be going on here?
>
>
Every insert updates four indexes, so at least 3 of those will be in
random order. The indexes don't fit in memory, so all those updates will
involve reading most of the relevant b-tree pages from disk (or at least
the leaf level). A total of 10ms of random read from disk (per inserted
row) wouldn't surprise me ... which adds up to more than 10 days for
your 93 million rows.

Mark Thornton