On Fri, Jan 06, 2006 at 04:49:09PM -0500, Tom Lane wrote: > performance risk in the sort of scenario you are describing. > (I'm not sure why it would manifest as transactions showing "INSERT > waiting" state though.)
It's because of I/O. When you have a large number of updates, the planner always assumes an indexscan (correctly), but you end up scanning megabytes of dead tuples. With a large number of open transactions, most of the time VACUUM can't recover the space. I agree with what Tom said earlier in this thread: the design is guaranteed to lose. A -- Andrew Sullivan | [EMAIL PROTECTED] "The year's penultimate month" is not in truth a good way of saying November. --H.W. Fowler ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 4: Have you searched our list archives? http://archives.postgresql.org