autofreeze/vacuuming - avoiding the random performance hit

Some of you may have had annoying problems in the past with autofreeze or autovacuum running at unexpected moments and dropping the performance of your server randomly.

On our SSD-RAID10 based system we found a 20GB table finished it's vacuum freeze in about 100 seconds. There were no noticeable interruptions to our services; maybe a tiny little bit of extra latency on the web maps, very hard to tell if it was real or imagination.

If auto-stuff in postgresql has been a pain point for you in the past, I can confirm that SSD drives are a nice solution (and also for any other autovacuum/analyze type stuff) since they can handle incoming random IO very nicely while also making very fast progress with the housekeeping work.

Graeme Bell