select * from foo (100 000 rows) takes 4 seconds, is this normal ?

Question

I have postgres 8.4 installed on ubuntu server with 4 GB Ram and Intel E5504 2Ghz

I've created one table

create table foo
(
id serial primary key,
fname varchar(30),
lname varchar(30)
) 

the insert of 10 000 rows takes about 4 seconds first time and 1 second after
but the select of 100 000 rows takes 4 seconds always,

select * from foo

is this normal or my configuration could be wrong ?

could it be that my ubuntu remote bandwith is limited or something like that ?

Answer 1

100000 rows of your table use 6.4 MBytes (or 12.4 MBytes if they are Unicode). This corresponds to 64 MBits, which takes about 6.4 seconds in a 10 MBit/s network. Therefore, the available network bandwidth may cause the 4 second delay that you are experiencing.