>> But the row estimates are not precise at the top of the join/filter.
>> It thinks there will 2120 rows, but there are only 11.
>Ah... I didn't spot that one...
Yes, you are right there - this is probably a slightly atypical query of
this sort actually, 2012 is a pretty good guess.
On Claudio's suggestion I have found lots more things to read up on and am
eagerly awaiting 6pm when I can bring the DB down and start tweaking. The
effective_work_mem setting is going from 6Gb->88Gb which I think will make
quite a difference.
I still can't quite wrap around my head why accessing an index is expected
to use more disk access than doing a bitmap scan of the table itself, but I
guess it does make a bit of sense if postgres assumes the table is more
likely to be cached.
It's all quite, quite fascinating :)
I'll let you know how it goes.
- Phil