Postgres Databases growing without much reason

Hello,

we are running Postgres 7.2.1 on a RH 7.2 System.
Currently there is a (imho) rather small Database running on the Server
and there are no other services eating up much of the CPU time. Only
postgres acts pretty strange.

The postgres 'data' directory grows far too fast. 90% of the queries to
postgres are simple selects, and there are about 190 Tables which mostly
are having ONLY 200-3000 rows. The 2 largest tables have 67000 and 132000
rows.

We had heavy performance problems and in the end I found, that the 'data'
directory
went up to 2 GB. This, by far, appeared too much for such a little dbase.

I completely dumped the dbase, dropped and restored it and instead of 2 GB
it was
only using 150 MB then. Now, after having this running for about 2 Weeks
constantly,
the performance is falling down again and the database grew up to 550 MB
again, although
there was not much inserted into the dbase-tables.

What is happening here ? Will upgrading to 7.2.4 or 7.3 help me out of this
dilemma ?
There are no views, rules or triggers put on this dbase so far and the
Apache/PHP combo
isnt using transactions either.

Has anyone else found this behaviour so far ?

Any input appreciated and urgently needed :)

l8r

Andreas Rust - webnova GmbH
rust(at)webnova(dot)de - www.webnova.de
Tel: +49 (0)234 - 912 96 10
Fax: +49 (0)234 - 912 96 15
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