Re: Performance degradation after successive UPDATE's

On Mon, Dec 05, 2005 at 19:05:01 +0200,
  Assaf Yaari <assafy@mobixell.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm using PostgreSQL 8.0.3 on Linux RedHat WS 3.0.
>
> My application updates counters in DB. I left a test over the night that
> increased counter of specific record. After night running (several
> hundreds of thousands updates), I found out that the time spent on
> UPDATE increased to be more than 1.5 second (at the beginning it was
> less than 10ms)! Issuing VACUUM ANALYZE and even reboot didn't seemed to
> solve the problem.

You need to be running vacuum more often to get rid of the deleted rows
(update is essentially insert + delete). Once you get too many, plain
vacuum won't be able to clean them up without raising the value you use for
FSM. By now the table is really bloated and you probably want to use
vacuum full on it.