Re: Vacuum wait time problem

On Fri, Feb 13, 2009 at 10:20 AM, Roger Ging <rging(at)musicreports(dot)com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm running vacuum full analyze verbose on a table with 20million rows and
> 11 indexes. In top, I'm seeing [pdflush] and postgres: writer process each
> using diferent cpu cores, with wait time well above 90% on each of them.
> The vacuum has been running for several hours, and the last thing to show
> on screen, over an hour ago, was :
>
> DETAIL: 8577281 index row versions were removed.
> 736 index pages have been deleted, 736 are currently reusable.
> CPU 7.57s/52.52u sec elapsed 381.70 sec.
>
> That's the last index
>
> The vacuum process itself is using less than 2% of a core.
> The pg version is 8.3.1 running on Suse. Hardware is 2X dual core Opterons,
> 16 GB RAM, 24 drives in RAID 50
>
> It would seem to me that the system is extremely IO bound, but I don't know
> how to find out what specifically is wrong here. Any advice greatly
> appreciated.

A couple of questions.
Why Vacuum full as opposed to vacuum (regular)?
Why 8.3.1 which has known bugs, instead of 8.3.latest?
What do "vmstat 10" and iostat -x 10 have to say about your drive
arrays while this vacuum is running?