"Jeremy M. Guthrie" <jeremy(dot)guthrie(at)berbee(dot)com> writes:
> In some cases the operation of my software goes from 1-3 second runtime to
> 300+ seconds during a vacuum.
That seems like a lot. I concur with the nearby recommendation to
reduce vacuum_mem, but I think there may be another problem. You should
watch top, iostat, vmstat during a vacuum to try to see what resource is
getting saturated.
> I'm runing 7.3.2 and I am upgrading to 7.3.3 next week.
7.3.4, please. 7.3.3 has at least one nasty bug.
regards, tom lane