Slow Delete : Seq scan instead of index scan

Hi to all,

I've got a trouble with some delete statements. My db contains a little more than 10000 tables and runs on a dedicated server (Debian 6 - bi quad - 16Gb - SAS disks raid 0). Most of the tables contains between 2 and 3 million rows and no foreign keys exist between them. Each is indexed (btree) on start_date / end_date fields (bigint). The Postgresql server has been tuned (I can give modified values if needed).

I perform recurrent DELETE upon a table subset (~1900 tables) and each time, I delete a few lines (between 0 and 1200). Usually it takes between 10s and more than 2mn. It seems to me to be a huge amount of time ! An EXPLAIN ANALYZE on a DELETE shows me that the planner uses a Seq Scan instead of an Index Scan. Autovaccum is on and I expect the db stats to be updated in real time (pg_stats file is stored in /dev/shm RAM disk for quick access).

Do you have any idea about this trouble ?

Sylvain Caillet
Bureau : + 33 5 59 41 51 10
scaillet(at)alaloop(dot)com

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