Re: Inconsistent performance

The world rejoiced as jbove@vetstar.com (Joseph Bove) wrote:
> Actually, it's inconsistent with the exact same command. I've now
> replicated the problem by doing the following command:
>
> select count (*) from table;
>
> The table in question has 88899 rows.
>
> The response time is anywhere from 1 second to 12 seconds. Different
> response times can occur in the same minute of testing!

The only possible plan for THAT query will involve a seq scan of the
whole table.  If the postmaster already has the data in cache, it
makes sense for it to run in 1 second.  If it has to read it from
disk, 12 seconds makes a lot of sense.

You might want to increase the "shared_buffers" parameter in
postgresql.conf; that should lead to increased stability of times as
it should be more likely that the data in "table" will remain in
cache.
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