Re: Primary key index suddenly became very slow

On Feb 8, 2016, at 10:45 AM, Gustav Karlsson <gustav.karlsson@bekk.no> wrote:

Hi,

Question:

What may cause a primary key index to suddenly become very slow? Index scan for single row taking 2-3 seconds. A manual vacuum resolved the problem.

Background:

We have a simple table ‘KONTO’ with about 600k rows. 

            Column            |            Type             |   Modifiers

------------------------------+-----------------------------+---------------

 id                           | bigint                      | not null

...

Indexes:

    "konto_pk" PRIMARY KEY, btree (id)

...

Over the weekend we experienced that lookups using the primary key index (‘konto_pk’) became very slow, in the region 2-3s for fetching a single record:

QUERY PLAN

Index Scan using konto_pk on konto  (cost=0.42..6.44 rows=1 width=164) (actual time=0.052..2094.549 rows=1 loops=1)

  Index Cond: (id = 2121172829)

Planning time: 0.376 ms

Execution time: 2094.585 ms

After a manual Vacuum the execution time is OK:

QUERY PLAN

Index Scan using konto_pk on konto  (cost=0.42..6.44 rows=1 width=164) (actual time=0.037..2.876 rows=1 loops=1)

  Index Cond: (id = 2121172829)

Planning time: 0.793 ms

Execution time: 2.971 ms

So things are working OK again, but we would like to know what may cause such a degradation of the index scan, to avoid this happening again? (We are using Postgresql version 9.4.4)

Regards,

Gustav