Re: 12+ hours index.

Shannon Sellers <ssseller@concentric.net> wrote in article <662n4s$dkr@examiner.concentric.net>... > We have a system with 54 million records. Building an index takes over 12 > hours. Is this an acceptable time or do we have a problem? it seems extreme > to me! > > The system is a 4 pentium pro running AT&T unix with I believe 128 meg of > ram and something like 72 Gig of harddrives. Whether or not it's acceptable depends on application, requirements. Whether or not it indicates a problem depends on the enviornment. I have no personal experience on a 4 CPU pentium pro so I don't have a "feel" for the expected performance. A lot also depends on the disk drives -- are they SCSCI-2, Fast-Wide SCSI-2, UltraSCSI, etc. There are definitely steps that can be taken to speed up index builds, depending on your version of Informix. Later versions can do parallel index builds, but this depends upon setting up a fragmentation strategy for the table and the index(es). With a 54 million row table, 4 CPUs and all those disks, the table certainly should be fragmented! Even if it is however, you need to take some extra steps to fragment the indexes and cause the index build to exploit parallel processing. HTH -- Irwin Goldstein Objective Software Systems, Inc. http://www.objectsoft.com