Re: Why is my table not autovacuuming?

On 08/28/2017 08:43 AM, Don Seiler wrote:
> PostgreSQL 9.2.18. I have a table with 71M rows (via select count). In
> pg_stat_activity, n_live_tups is 170K, n_dead_tups is slightly more than
> that (203K). The autovacuum parameter is on, the scale factor is 0.2
> (default) and threshold is 50 (default), autovacuum_max_workers is 3.
> There are no custom autovacuum thresholds set for this table. The
> last_autovacuum field is null.

<snip>

> Wondering why my autovacuum daemon appears to be acting lazily?

Autovac will kick in at (threshold + (scale_factor x 71M)), i.e. about
14.2 million dead rows. You are currently nowhere close to that.

That said, the default scale_factor is not good to such a large table.
Reduce it significantly. I often will find it necessary to use custom
values for large tables. One strategy I have used is scale_factor = 0
and threshold = <num_dead_rows_max_desired>.

Joe

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