On Thu, Jun 23, 2011 at 5:05 PM, Harry Mantheakis
<harry(dot)mantheakis(at)riskcontrollimited(dot)com> wrote:
> TOP, FREE and VMSTAT utilities indicate that only about half of the 6GB of
> memory is being used, so I have no reason to believe that the server is
> struggling.
You have a hinky idea of server load.
Mind you, there are lots of ways in which it could be struggling,
other than memory usage.
Like IO, CPU, lock contention...
In my experience, such huge updates struggle a lot with fsync and
random I/O when updating the indices.
It will be a lot faster if you can drop all indices (including the
PK), if you can.