Hi Philip,

> On 4. Jun 2020, at 00:23, Philip Semanchuk <phi...@americanefficient.com> 
> wrote:
> 
>> I guess you should show an explain analyze, specifically "Workers
>> Planned/Launched", maybe by linking to explain.depesz.com
> 
> Out of an abundance of caution, our company has a policy of not pasting our 
> plans to public servers. However, I can confirm that when I set 
> max_parallel_workers_per_gather > 4 and the runtime increases, this is what’s 
> in the EXPLAIN ANALYZE output:
> 
>         Workers Planned: 1
>         Workers Launched: 1

Can you please verify the amount of max_parallel_workers and 
max_worker_processes? It should be roughly max_worker_processes > 
max_parallel_workers > max_parallel_workers_per_gather, for instance:

max_worker_processes = 24
max_parallel_workers = 18
max_parallel_workers_per_gather = 6

Also, there are more configuration settings related to parallel queries you 
might want to look into. Most notably:

parallel_setup_cost
parallel_tuple_cost
min_parallel_table_scan_size

Especially the last one is a typical dealbreaker, you can try to set it to 0 
for the beginning. Good starters for the others are 500 and 0.1 respectively.

> FWIW, the Planning Time reported in EXPLAIN ANALYZE output doesn’t vary 
> significantly, only from 411-443ms, and the variation within that range 
> correlates only very weakly with max_parallel_workers_per_gather.


It can happen, that more parallelism does not help the query but slows it down 
beyond a specific amount of parallel workers. You can see this in EXPLAIN when 
there is for instance a BITMAP HEAP INDEX SCAN or similar involved.

Cheers,
Sebastian

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