Re: regarding CLUSTER and HUGE work_mem / maintenance_work_mem

On Fri, Jan 27, 2012 at 7:34 PM, Jon Nelson <jnelson+pgsql(at)jamponi(dot)net> wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 27, 2012 at 12:05 PM, Heikki Linnakangas
> <heikki(dot)linnakangas(at)enterprisedb(dot)com> wrote:
>> On 27.01.2012 19:43, Jon Nelson wrote:
>>>
>>> Let's say I have a 7GB table with 3-4 indices for a total of 10-12GB.
>>> Furthermore, let's say I have a machine with sufficient memory for me
>>> to set the work_mem  and maintenance_work_mem to 20GB (just for this
>>> session).
>>> When I issue a CLUSTER using one of the indices, I see PostgreSQL (by
>>> way of strace) performing an index scan which amounts to large
>>> quantities of random I/O.
>>> In my case, that means it takes a very, very long time. PostgreSQL is
>>> largely at defaults, except for a 2GB shared_buffers and a few
>>> unrelated changes. The system itself has 32GB of physical RAM and has
>>> plenty free.
>>> Why didn't PostgreSQL just read the table into memory (and the
>>> interesting index) as a sequential scan, sort, and then write it out?
>>> It seems like there would be more than enough memory for that. The
>>> sequential I/O rate on this machine is 50-100x the random I/O rate.
>>>
>>> I'm using 8.4.10 (with the 'inet' de-toasting patch) on Scientific Linux
>>> 6.1.
>>
>>
>> The suppport for doing a seqscan+sort in CLUSTER was introduced in version
>> 9.1. Before that, CLUSTER always did an indexscan. See release notes:
>> http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.1/static/release-9-1.html#AEN107416
>
> That's what I get for digging through the source (git) but working
> with 8.4.10, on a Friday, at the end of a long week.
> Thanks for pointing that out to somebody that should have known better.

But if you're stuck on < 9.1 for a while, the workaround is to cluster
the table yourself by using a select * ... order by pkey. For
randomly distributed tables this is far faster for a first time
cluster. After that, subsequent clusters won't have as much work to
do and the older method for clustering should work ok.

It's kinda funny to have a complaint against pgsql for NOT using a
sequential scan. Most DBAs that come from other DBAs are upset when
it doesn't use an index.