Re: Improve COPY performance for large data sets

On Wednesday 10 September 2008, Ryan Hansen <ryan(dot)hansen(at)brightbuilders(dot)com>
wrote:
>Currently it's taking about 12 hours to complete on a 64 bit
> server with 3 GB memory allocated (shared_buffer), single SATA 320 GB
> drive. I don't seem to get any improvement running the same operation
> on a dual opteron dual-core, 16 GB server.
>
> I'm not asking for someone to solve my problem, just some direction in
> the best ways to tune for faster bulk loading, since this will be a
> fairly regular operation for our application (assuming it can work this
> way). I've toyed with the maintenance_work_mem and some of the other
> params, but it's still way slower than it seems like it should be.
> So any contributions are much appreciated.

Your drive subsystem, such as it is, is inappropriate for a database. Your
bottleneck is your drive.

Turning fsync off might help. You should also drop all indexes on the table
before the COPY and add them back after (which would eliminate a lot of
random I/O during the COPY).

--
Alan