I've run into a performance issue, and I think autovacuum may be involved.
does anyone know if its possible to temporarily stop autovacuum without a server restart ?
It seems that it either requires a server restart, or specific tables to be configured.
Several times a day/week, I run a handful of scripts to handle database maintenance and backups:
* refreshing materialized views
* calculating analytics/derived/summary tables and columns
* backing up the database (pg_dumpall > bz2 > archiving)
These activities have occasionally overlapped with autovacuum, and the performance seems to be affected.