PSQL = fast, remote sql = v.slow

Okay, I appreciate that the question is a tad vague, but after a day of googling, I'm getting nowhere, any help will be appreciated, and I'm willing to try anything.

The issue is that we have a PostgreSQL db, that has arount 10-15 million rows in a particular table.

We're doing a select for all the columns, based on a DateTime field in the table. No joins, just a standard select with a where clause (time >= x AND time <= y). There is an index on the field as well...

When I perform the sql using psql on the local machine, it runs in around 15-20 seconds, and brings back .5 million rows, one of which is a text field holding a large amount of data per row (a program stack trace). When we use the same sql and run it through Npgsql, or pgadmin III on windows, it takes around 2minutes.

This is leading me to think that it's a network issue. I've checked on the machine when the query is running and it's not using a huge amount of memory or CPU, and the network speed is negligible.

I've gone through the recommendations on the Postgres Site for the memory settings as well. including updating shmmax and shmall.

It's Ubuntu 10.04, PSQL 8.4, 4GB RAM, 2.8GHz Quad Xeon (virtual but dedicated resources). the machine has it's windows counterpart (2008 R2, SS2008) on there as well, but turned off. The Query returns in around 10-15 seconds using SS with the same schema and data, I know this wouldn't be a direct comparison, but wanted to show that it wasn't a disk performance issue.

So the question is... any suggestions? Are there any network settings I should be changing? Anything that I've missed? I can't give too much information about the database, but here is a EXPLAIN ANALYZE that's obfuscated...

Index Scan using "IDX_column1" on "table1"  (cost=0.00..45416.20 rows=475130 width=148) (actual time=0.025..170.812 rows=482266 loops=1)
Index Cond: (("column1" >= '2011-03-14 00:00:00'::timestamp without time zone) AND ("column1" <= '2011-03-14 23:59:59'::timesta开发者_JAVA百科mp without time zone))
Total runtime: 196.898 ms

Try setting cursor_tuple_fraction to 1 in psql and see if it changes the results. If so, then it is likely that the optimiser is picking a better plan based on only getting the top 10% or so of results compared to getting the whole lot. Istr psql uses a cursor to fetch results piece by piece rather than the "firehose" executequery method.

If this is the case, it doesn't point directly to a solution, but you will need to tweak your planner settings, and at least if you can reproduce the behaviour in psql than it may be easier to see the differences and test changes.