Re: Auto Vacuum Daemon

On 3/12/2009 7:24 AM, Rikard Bosnjakovic wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 2, 2009 at 13:46,<A(dot)Bhattacharya(at)sungard(dot)com> wrote:
>
>> Is it fine to do that or should we manually perform vacuum and analyze.
>>
>> Will it automatically take care of vacuuming the tables and analyzing them?
>
> Have a look at this wiki-page that was posted by Craig on this list a
> few days ago:
>
> http://wiki.postgresql.org/index.php?title=VACUUM_FULL

For that question you're better off reading:

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/routine-vacuuming.html#AUTOVACUUM

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.3/interactive/runtime-config-autovacuum.html

The main thing to understand is that turning on autovacuum may not be
quite sufficient if you have some tables with really high update or
delete loads. You may need to tell autovacuum to pay more attention to
those tables. Similarly, on heavily loaded databases you might need to
tune autovacuum to be more aggressive so that it keeps up with table bloat.

Since you're still on 8.3 you will also need to make sure that your
max_fsm_pages are sufficient. 8.4 gets rid of that configuration option
and manages the task for you automatically instead, so consider
upgrading at some point.

--
Craig Ringer