Re: Is regular vacuuming with autovacuum needed?

On Mon, Aug 16, 2010 at 12:08 PM, Peter Koczan <pjkoczan(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I have an database server that is experiencing some lock contention
> and deadlock. It's infrequent, maybe once every two months, but
> time-consuming to deal with.
>
> The issue was that a routine VACUUM process (vacuumdb -az, called
> nightly via cron) was locking a table and wasn't completing. This
> server is also running autovacuum. This wasn't the source of the
> deadlock, but I'm wondering if regular vacuuming is necessary or even
> desirable with autovacuum running. Is there any reason for me to not
> disable the vacuum cron job and just tweak autovacuum parameters (or
> even just to leave the defaults)?

If autovac is properly configured, very few, if any, PostgreSQL
databases need routine vacuuming jobs. However, other than sleep
states making it run slower, autovacuum is no different than a regular
old vacuum. Are you sure this wasn't a vacuum full, which is almost
never a desired operation to be regularly scheduled?
--
To understand recursion, one must first understand recursion.