Re: CREATE TABLE slowing down significantly over time

On Sat, Nov 7, 2009 at 11:58 PM, Aris Samad-Yahaya
<aris@quickschools.com> wrote:
> We vacuum analyze nightly, and vacuum normally ad-hoc (but we're going to
> schedule this weekly moving forward).
>
> Interesting pointer about system catalog bloat. I tried to vacuum full the
> system catalog tables (pg_*), and the performance for creating a single
> table manually improved dramatically (back to what it used to be), but as
> soon as I created the next schema, the performance went back down to the
> same level.
>
> So there's a clue there somewhere. Next I will try to vacuum full the entire
> database.

You should really enable autovacuum.  You'll probably have to VACUUM
FULL and REINDEX to clean everything up, but after that autovacuum
should be MUCH more effective than a nightly vacuum run.  If you're
running some ancient Pg version where autovacuum is not enabled by
default, you should also consider upgrading.  There are a lot of
goodies (including performance enhancements) in newer versions.

...Robert