On Sun, 17 Aug 2003, Tom Lane wrote:
> Stephan Szabo <sszabo@megazone.bigpanda.com> writes:
> >> with reltuples=1000 for pktest, query takes about 96 seconds
> >> reltuples=10000, query takes about 15 seconds
> >> reltuples=100000, query takes about 8 seconds
>
> > Errm, I meant in the cases where it still chose a hashed
> > subplan. Stupid cold medicine.
>
> I'm confused too. Please explain again when you're feeling better...
Basically, the first thing I noticed was that changing reltuples
on the pg_class row for a table affected the speed of
explain analyze select * from othertable where foo not in (select bar from
table);
even when the plan wasn't changing, seqscan + filter on hashed subquery.
I thought that was kind of odd since the plan didn't seem any different,
but the real world time changed by about a factor of 10.
Then I noted that changing sort_mem changed the point at which it would
choose a hashed subquery in the initial plan based on the estimated
tuples, but didn't seem to actually affect the real memory usage, which
means that a table with a few million rows but reltuples still set at 1000
would eat up a very large amount of memory (in my case it sent my machine
a few hundred megs into swap).