Re: Disk filling, CPU filling, renegade inserts and deletes?

Richard Plotkin <richard(at)richardplotkin(dot)com> writes:
> I'm having a pretty serious problem with postgresql's performance.
> Currently, I have a cron task that is set to restart and vacuumdb -faz
> every six hours. If that doesn't happen, the disk goes from 10% full
> to 95% full within 2 days (and it's a 90GB disk...with the database
> being a 2MB download after dump), and the CPU goes from running at
> around a 2% load to a 99+% load right away (the stats look like a
> square wave).

Q: what have you got the FSM parameters set to?

Q: what exactly is bloating? Without knowing which tables or indexes
are growing, it's hard to speculate about the exact causes. Use du and
oid2name, or look at pg_class.relpages after a plain VACUUM.

It's likely that the real answer is "you need to vacuum more often
than every six hours", but I'm trying not to jump to conclusions.

regards, tom lane