Re: 3-days-long vacuum of 20GB table

On Fri, Apr 18, 2008 at 10:32 AM, Jeffrey Baker <jwbaker(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>
> On Fri, Apr 18, 2008 at 10:03 AM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> > "Jeffrey Baker" <jwbaker(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> > > This autovacuum has been hammering my server with purely random i/o
> > > for half a week. The table is only 20GB and the i/o subsystem is good
> > > for 250MB/s sequential and a solid 5kiops. When should I expect it to
> > > end (if ever)?
> >
> > What have you got maintenance_work_mem set to? Which PG version
> > exactly?
>
> This is 8.1.9 on Linux x86_64,
>
> # show maintenance_work_mem ;
> maintenance_work_mem
> ----------------------
> 16384

That appears to be the default. I will try increasing this. Can I
increase it globally from a single backend, so that all other backends
pick up the change, or do I have to restart the instance?

-jwb