Re: REINDEX takes half a day (and still not complete!)

On Apr 17, 2011, at 11:30 AM, Phoenix Kiula <phoenix(dot)kiula(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> Sorry, rejuvenating a thread that was basically unanswered.
>
> I closed the database for any kinds of access to focus on maintenance
> operations, killed all earlier processes so that my maintenance is the
> only stuff going on.
>
> REINDEX is still taking 3 hours -- and it is still not finished!
>
> Similarly, if I cancel the REINDEX and issue a VACUUM ANALYZE VERBOSE,
> this too seems to just hang there on my big table.
>
> I changed the maintenance_work_men to 2GB for this operation. It's
> highly worrisome -- the above slow times are with 2GB of my server
> dedicated to Postgresql!!!!
>
> Surely this is not tenable for enterprise environments? I am on a
> 64bit RedHat server with dual CPU Intel Woodcrest or whatever that was
> called. Postgres is 8.2.9.
>
> How do DB folks do this with small maintenance windows? This is for a
> very high traffic website so it's beginning to get embarrassing.
>
> Would appreciate any thoughts or pointers.

An upgrade would probably help you a lot, and as others have said it sounds like your hardware is failing, so you probably want to deal with that first.

I am a bit surprised, however, that no one seems to have mentioned using CLUSTER rather than VACUUM or REINDEX. Sometimes that's worth a try...

...Robert