I am trying to cluster an index on the TPC-H lineitem table having 6 million records. The index is on a single column l_suppkey. Postgres (8.1.3) is not able to finish the operation even after 2 hours! The disk is being accessed continuously and CPU is at 2%. Postmaster is started with the following options:
No useful messages in the logfile. With the default checkpoint_segments (before I increased it to 128), there was a warning about checkpoints taking place too frequently.
I tried this on two different machines and also with 8.1.4 and see the same behavior.
On the same system, I am able to cluster an index on another much larger table (10 million) records within few minutes.