Re: Subject: bool / vacuum full bug followup part 2

On Tue, 7 May 2002, Martijn van Oosterhout wrote:

> On Mon, May 06, 2002 at 10:23:53AM -0600, Scott Marlowe wrote:
> > A growing index that vacuum doesn't shrink is a serious issue for people
> > who expect to reclaim lost space with vacuum. We at least need to let
> > people know of this behavior in the admin docs, as right now they (the
> > docs) seem to imply that vacuum frees up all unused space. For indexes,
> > this isn't true, and people who are getting started don't need this kind
> > of gotcha waiting to kill a production database 2 or 6 months into use.
>
> PostgreSQL has never shrunk indexes, not now not never. The only option is
> to reindex or recreate them. We use a script here to automatically rebuild
> all the indexes each month.

That wouldn't be so bothersome if it was in the admin docs, or if the
space in them got reused, but so far, it looks like the btrees don't
reuse space much, if at all, and this is the first I've heard about
indexes just growing and growing and growing (insert bunny with drum here
:-)

Think I'll write a section for the postgresql admin docs and submit it.

Thanks for the sript, I already had one in php, and was about to write one
in bash to make it more portable.