Kevin Brown <kevin@sysexperts.com> writes:
> One problem I've been running into is the merge join spilling to disk
> because sort_mem isn't big enough. The problem isn't that this is
> happening, it's that I think the planner is underestimating the impact
> that doing this will have on the time the merge join takes. Does the
> planner even account for the possibility that a sort or join will spill
> to disk?
Yes it does. I thought it was making a pretty good estimate, actually.
The only obvious hole in the assumptions is
* The disk traffic is assumed to be half sequential and half random
* accesses (XXX can't we refine that guess?)
Because of the way that tuplesort.c works, the first merge pass should
be pretty well sequential, but I think the passes after that might be
mostly random from the kernel's viewpoint :-(. Possibly the I/O cost
should be adjusted depending on how many merge passes we expect.
> In any case, one thing that none of this really accounts for is that
> it's better to set random_page_cost too low than too high.
That depends on what you are doing, although I will concede that a lot
of people are doing things where indexscans should be favored.
regards, tom lane