What is pgbench
Pgbench is a simple tool to perform performance tests on PostgreSQL. Since pgbench comes with PostgreSQL distribution and it's easy to use, many users and developers regularly use pgbench. The original version of pgbench was written by me in 1999 and then it was contributed to PostgreSQL. Since then many people have enhanced the tool.
Loading data takes long time
Pgbench has a feature to load initial data into the benchmark tables (-i or --initialize option). By specifying scaling factor (-s option) users can create data as large as he/she wants. For example scaling factor 100 will create 10 millions rows. When I execute pgbench command with the scaling factor 100, it took 70 seconds on my laptop. You can see how long each part of the process took:
done in 70.78 s (drop tables 0.21 s, create tables 0.02 s, client-side generate 12.42 s, vacuum 51.11 s, primary keys 7.02 s).
As you can see, most of the time was spent in vacuum: 51.11 seconds.
