Hi there,

I have a small, simple table of about a dozen columns, that contains
less than 100 records.
Primary key is a serial id, there's a few small strings, numbers and
dates, and a foreign key (another serial int)

Usually, a select * from tablename where owner_id = <id>; takes a
negligible amount of time.
However, under certain conditions/querying certain records the query
takes more than 40 seconds!
Those records are no different that the ones for which the query is
fast.

I have absolutely no idea what could cause a simple select on a small
table to take that long - any pointers?

Examples of things I've tried:
- Select * from items where owner_id = 1; -> fast
- Select * from items where owner_id = 7; -> very slow (40 seconds),
owner with id of 7 is no different from others
- Select * from items where owner_id = 7 and id > 0;
-> dummy conditions makes it fast again, but I 'm using an O/R-
framework, so i can't add the dummy condition manually

It happens only on the production server, on a similar testing server
as well as my local development machine it works fine. Postgres
version on the production machine is 8.1.9 running on CentOS linux.