Odd performance results

I have a table with a 3 column key. I noticed that when I update a non-key field
in a record of the table that the update was taking longer than I thought it
should. After much experimenting I discovered that if I changed the data
types of two of the key columns to FLOAT8 that I got vastly improved
performance.

Orignally the data types of the 3 columns were FLOAT4, FLOAT4 and INT4.
My plaform is a PowerPC running Linux. I speculated that the performance
improvement might be because the PowePC is a 64 bit processor but when
I changed the column data types to INT8, INT8 and INT4 I din't see any
improvement. I also ran my test code on a Pentium 4 machine with the same
results in all cases.

This doesn't make any sense to me. Why would FLOAT8 keys ever result
in improved performance?

I verified with EXPLAIN that the index is used in every case for the update.

My postmaster version is 7.1.3.

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

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Medora Schauer
Sr. Software Engineer

Fairfield Industries
14100 Southwest Freeway
Suite 600
Sugar Land, Tx 77478-3469
USA

mschauer(at)fairfield(dot)com
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