GiST, caching, and consistency

I'm seeing an interesting phenomenon while I'm trying to
performance-optimise a GiST index. Basically, running a performance test
appears to be the same thing as running a random number generator. For
example, here I'm running the same statement eight times in quick
succession:

> modmine_overlap_test=# \timing
> Timing is on.
> modmine_overlap_test=# select count(*) from (select * FROM
> locatedsequencefeatureoverlappingfeatures limit 1000000) AS a;
>   count
> ---------
>  1000000
> (1 row)
>
> Time: 138583.140 ms
>
> Time: 153769.152 ms
>
> Time: 127518.574 ms
>
> Time: 49629.036 ms
>
> Time: 70926.034 ms
>
> Time: 7625.034 ms
>
> Time: 7382.609 ms
>
> Time: 7985.379 ms

"locatedsequencefeatureoverlappingfeatures" is a view, which performs a
join with a GiST index. The machine was otherwise idle, and has plenty of
RAM free.

Shouldn't the data be entirely in cache the second time I run the
statement? However, it's worse than that, because while the long-running
statements were running, I saw significant CPU usage in top - more than
eight seconds worth. Again, one one test there was no io-wait, but on a
subsequent test there was lots of io-wait.

How can this be so inconsistent?

Matthew

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