[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Reece Hart) writes: > On Thu, 2003-11-13 at 10:09, scott.marlowe wrote: > > Do you vacuum full every so often? If not, and if you've been overflowing > your fsm, then your tables will just grow without shrinking. > Also, index growth could be a problem. > > Hmm. I didn't realize that I needed to vacuum full as well -- I > thought vacuum was sufficient for performance gains, and that full > reclaimed space but didn't result in significant performance > gains. I have reindexed infrequently, but since that locks the table > I didn't do that (or vacuum full) often. I guess I should try out > pg_autovacuum, but I think that full vacuums only to prevent XID > wraparound (if age>1.5B transactions), but not for compaction (is > this correct?).
That's not quite correct. pg_autovacuum NEVER does a VACUUM FULL, and it is not necessary to do so in order to avoid XID wraparound. A "simple VACUUM" suffices for that purpose.. What pg_autovacuum "buys you" is mainly twofold: 1. You don't need to schedule batch jobs to vacuum things; 2. If you have heavily updated tables, it will vacuum them a lot, which should prevent them from "blowing out" the free space map, and allow quicker reuse of dead space. The merits of that aren't infinite, but are not nothing, either. -- output = reverse("ofni.smrytrebil" "@" "enworbbc") <http://dev6.int.libertyrms.com/> Christopher Browne (416) 646 3304 x124 (land) ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 4: Don't 'kill -9' the postmaster