[rt-users] Re: Fulltext search on postgres: Weak performance

[Daniel Pittman]

"Florian Hochstrasser" <florian.hochstrasser at swisslog.com> writes:

> My boss just complained that fulltext searches (i.e. Content matches)
> queries are too slow. Is there any way I could improve the
> performance? The server has enough free resources, so I don't think
> that's the problem.

Have you tuned the PostgreSQL installation at all?

By default, PostgreSQL comes with a maximum of 8MB of database content
in memory at one time, and will use disk buffers for sorting anything
with > 1MB of content.

Tuning those values up can significantly improve performance on the
database, in general.  This is the single most common cause of
"PostgreSQL is slow" complaints;  other databases ship with much more
... realistic settings on modern machines.


Failing that, have you considered using 'analyze explain' to determine
where the poor performance in the query comes from?  Perhaps with that
as a guide, better indexing can be created for your use case.

        Daniel