[rt-users] Poor performance in upgrade from RT2 to RT3

[Carl Gibbons]

I am trying to migrate an 8,000+ ticket system.

Existing system:
  Red Hat 7.1
  perl 5.6.0 installed from RPMs
  RT 2.0.13
  Apache 1.3.23/mod_perl 1.23
  PostgreSQL 7.1.3, installed from RPMs
New system:
  Red Hat ES 2.1
  perl 5.8.0 (compiled from source)
  RT  3.0.4
  Apache 1.3.28/mod_perl 1.28
  PostgreSQL 7.3.4, compiled from source

Both systems are dual-processor 700MHz PIII with 1024MB RAM.
(I'm not sure, but I think both have the same SCSI disk and
RAID configuration, too.) The rt2-to-rt3-v1.20 tool successfully
moved users and tickets from the existing system to the new one.

Logging into the RT2 system and clicking on "Home" to display the
"25 highest priority tickets I own" takes a fraction of a second.

Logging into the RT3 system and clicking on "Home" to display the
"10 highest priority tickets I own" takes about 50 seconds.

Running "top" on the new RT3 system while I click on "Home" shows
that a PostgreSQL "postmaster" process pegs one of the CPUs at 99%
throughout those 50 seconds.

(I tried increasing the shared_buffers parameter in postgresql.conf,
but it did not help.) Any ideas on how to make RT3 give me the
fraction-of-a-second response to which I am accustomed?

-- Carl Gibbons, Network Security Engineer, University of Denver