Re: Performance, vacuum and reclaiming space, fsm

On Mon, 13 Oct 2003, Seum-Lim Gan wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I did a search in the discussion lists and found several
> pointers about setting the max_fsm_relations and pages.
>
> I have a table that keeps being updated and noticed
> that after a few days, the disk usage has growned to
> from just over 150 MB to like 2 GB !
>
> I followed the recommendations from the various search
> of the archives, changed the max_fsm_relations, pages,
> keep doing vacuum like every minute while the
> table of interest in being updated. I kept
> watching the disk space usage and still noticed that
> it continues to increase.
>
> Looks like vacuum has no effect.
>
> I did vacuum tablename and don't intend to use
> the full option since it locks the table.
>
> I have 7.3.3 running in Solaris 9.
>
> Any recommendation ?
>
> Thanks.
>
> Gan
>

Try auto_vacuum (its in the 7.4beta4 contrib directory) I find it
very useful. Often you find that every minute in fact can be a little too
often. My table updates every couple of seconds but is vacuumed
(automatically) every hmm hour.
If you have lots of overlapping vacumms and or editing connections
records may be held on to by one vacuum so the next can't do its job.
Always ensure that there is only one vacuum process. (You can't do this
easily with cron!)
I'm still using 7.3.2. 7.3.3 is sposed to have some big bugs and
7.3.4 was produced within 24 hours.(must upgrade at some point)
Oh yes Index have problems (I think this is fix in later
versions...) so you might want to try reindex.

They are all worth a try its a brief summary of what been on
preform for weeks and weeks now.

Peter Childs