As I understand it vacuum operates outside of the regular transaction and if you stop it (SIGTERM, or pg_cancel_backend()) some of the work it accomplished will be kept when it rolls back.
For large structures with a ton of dead entries (which I seem to have a case), running vacuum takes long enough that high-churn structures begin to experience difficulties. Is it reasonable to cancel and restart the vacuum process periodically (say every 12 hours) until it manages to complete the work? It takes about 2 hours to do the table scan, and should get in about 10 hours of index work each round. The vacuum ignores vacuum transaction concept looks handy right now. -- ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 1: if posting/reading through Usenet, please send an appropriate subscribe-nomail command to [EMAIL PROTECTED] so that your message can get through to the mailing list cleanly