Slow schema / table creation in postgres

Question

I have a postgres database with ~65,000 schemas (one-per-customer), each with ~5 - 20 tables. I'm noticing that creating new schemas and tables seems to be slowing down. I'm guessing there might be a system table that's not indexed properly to support this scenario, but calling "EXPLAIN CREATE SCHEMA" throws a syntax error, so I'm at a loss for how to debug this. Any ideas?

EDIT: This is an Amazon RDS database, m4.2xlarge instance w/ high availability, 400 GB of SSD storage.

Answer 1

Unless you took special steps, you're storing 325,000 to 1.3 million files in a single directory. Not all filesystems deal gracefully with that many files one directory.

The special steps involve creating tablespaces, and moving tables or indexes using alter table ... set tablespace ....