The problem is, that a SELECT * FROM foobar; takes ages (roughly 3 minutes) to return the first row. I played around with the fetchSize() to disable the result set caching in the Java program first (before I tried psql) but that did not change anything.

        Hello,

        Yours seemed strange so I tried this :
Created a table with 128K lines, 4 TEXT columns containing about 70 chars each...

---------------------------------------------
\d bigtest;
 Colonne |  Type   |                      Modificateurs
---------+---------+---------------------------------------------------------
id | integer | not null default nextval('public.bigtest_id_seq'::text)
 data1   | text    |
 data2   | text    |
 data3   | text    |
 data4   | text    |
Index :
    «bigtest_pkey» PRIMARY KEY, btree (id)

---------------------------------------------

SELECT count(*) from bigtest;
 count
--------
 131072

---------------------------------------------

explain analyze select * from bigtest;
                                                    QUERY PLAN
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Seq Scan on bigtest (cost=0.00..7001.72 rows=131072 width=308) (actual time=0.035..484.249 rows=131072 loops=1)
 Total runtime: 875.095 ms

So grabbing the data takes 0.875 seconds.

---------------------------------------------

SELECT avg(length(data1)), avg(length(data2)),avg(length(data3)),avg(length(data3)) from bigtest; avg | avg | avg | avg
---------------------+---------------------+---------------------+---------------------
72.1629180908203125 | 72.2342376708984375 | 72.3680572509765625 | 72.3680572509765625

Here you see the average data sizes.

---------------------------------------------

Now I fire up python, do a SELECT * from the table and retrieve all the data as native objects... Hm, it takes about 1.3 seconds... on my Pentium-M 1600 laptop...

I was about to suggest you use a less slow and bloated language than Java, but then on my machine psql takes about 5 seconds to display the results, so it looks like it ain't Java. psql is slow because it has to format the result and compute the column widths.

Don't you have a problem somewhere ? Are you sure it's not swapping ? did you check memory ? Are you transferring all this data over the network ? Might an obscure cabling problem have reverted your connection to 10 Mbps ?

        I'm using pg 8.0.something on Linux.

Ouch. I saw you're on Windows so I tried it on the windows machine there which has a postgres installed, over a 100Mbps network, querying from my linux laptop. The windows machine is a piece of crap, Pentium-II 300 and 256 MB Ram, it takes 7 seconds to retrieve the whole table in a python native object.

        So...












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