Slow Redshift COPY Performance into an Interleaved table

Question

We are seeing slow performance when using the COPY command into an interleaved table with 4 Sort Keys. When I remove the interleaved option, the copy finishes very quickly.

These are the stats to copy data from S3 to Redshift:

We loaded 70 million records

Interleaved sort key - 52 mins Compound sort key - 8 mins No Sort Key - 7mins

Our sort key had 4 columns in it. We have a DIST KEY also.

Can anyone provide a reasoning of why copy performance into an interleaved sort key performs poorly?

Answer 1

There was an automated backup which was running at the same time, which caused the COPY into the Interleaved table go slow..