Ron,
> The emp table has 60 columns, all indexed, about two-thirds are numeric,
> but they are not affected by this update. The other 50+ columns are
> updated in the middle of the night and the amount of time that update
> takes isn't a concern.
Well, I'd say that you have an application design problem, but that's not what
you asked for help with ;-)
> Late last night I dumped the table, dropped it and re-created it from
> the dump (on the production server - when no one was looking). When I
> re-ran the function it took almost 11 minutes, which was pretty much in
> line with my results from the dev server.
Sounds like you need to run a REINDEX on the table -- and after that,
dramatically increase your max_fsm_pages, and run lazy VACUUM immediately
after the batch update to clean up.
--
-Josh Berkus
Aglio Database Solutions
San Francisco