Robert Haas <robertmh...@gmail.com> writes: > That's a bit disappointing - it's now more than a third faster to do > the sequential scan, even though the sequential scan has to touch six > times as many blocks (at scale factor 20, index is 43 MB, table is 256 > MB) all of which are in cache. Of course, touching that many fewer > blocks does have some advantages if there is concurrent activity on > the system, but it still seems unfortunate that the ratio of runtime > to blocks touched is more than 8x higher for the index-only case.
I don't know why you'd imagine that touching an index is free, or even cheap, CPU-wise. The whole point of the index-only optimization is to avoid I/O. When you try it on a case where there's no I/O to be saved, *and* no shared-buffers contention to be avoided, there's no way it's going to be a win. regards, tom lane -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers