19.10. Automatic Vacuuming
These settings control the behavior of the autovacuum feature. Refer to Section 24.1.6 for more information. Note that many of these settings can be overridden on a per-table basis; see Storage Parameters.
autovacuum
(boolean
)Controls whether the server should run the autovacuum launcher daemon. This is on by default; however, track_counts must also be enabled for autovacuum to work. This parameter can only be set in the
postgresql.conf
file or on the server command line; however, autovacuuming can be disabled for individual tables by changing table storage parameters.Note that even when this parameter is disabled, the system will launch autovacuum processes if necessary to shrink
pg_xact
andpg_multixact
. See Section 24.1.5 for more information.log_autovacuum_min_duration
(integer
)Causes each action executed by autovacuum to be logged if it ran for at least the specified number of milliseconds. Setting this to zero logs all autovacuum actions. Minus-one (the default) disables logging autovacuum actions. For example, if you set this to
250ms
then all automatic vacuums and analyzes that run 250ms or longer will be logged. In addition, when this parameter is set to any value other than-1
, a message will be logged if an autovacuum action is skipped due to the existence of a conflicting lock. Enabling this parameter can be helpful in tracking autovacuum activity. This parameter can only be set in thepostgresql.conf
file or on the server command line; but the setting can be overridden for individual tables by changing table storage parameters.autovacuum_max_workers
(integer
)Specifies the maximum number of autovacuum processes (other than the autovacuum launcher) that may be running at any one time. The default is three. This parameter can only be set at server start.
autovacuum_naptime
(integer
)Specifies the minimum delay between autovacuum runs on any given database. In each round the daemon examines the database and issues
VACUUM
andANALYZE
commands as needed for tables in that database. The delay is measured in seconds, and the default is one minute (1min
). This parameter can only be set in thepostgresql.conf
file or on the server command line.autovacuum_vacuum_threshold
(integer
)Specifies the minimum number of updated or deleted tuples needed to trigger a
VACUUM
in any one table. The default is 50 tuples. This parameter can only be set in thepostgresql.conf
file or on the server command line; but the setting can be overridden for individual tables by changing table storage parameters.autovacuum_analyze_threshold
(integer
)Specifies the minimum number of inserted, updated or deleted tuples needed to trigger an
ANALYZE
in any one table. The default is 50 tuples. This parameter can only be set in thepostgresql.conf
file or on the server command line; but the setting can be overridden for individual tables by changing table storage parameters.autovacuum_vacuum_scale_factor
(floating point
)Specifies a fraction of the table size to add to
autovacuum_vacuum_threshold
when deciding whether to trigger aVACUUM
. The default is 0.2 (20% of table size). This parameter can only be set in thepostgresql.conf
file or on the server command line; but the setting can be overridden for individual tables by changing table storage parameters.autovacuum_analyze_scale_factor
(floating point
)Specifies a fraction of the table size to add to
autovacuum_analyze_threshold
when deciding whether to trigger anANALYZE
. The default is 0.1 (10% of table size). This parameter can only be set in thepostgresql.conf
file or on the server command line; but the setting can be overridden for individual tables by changing table storage parameters.autovacuum_freeze_max_age
(integer 64
)Specifies the maximum age (in transactions) that a table's
pg_class
.relfrozenxid
field can attain before aVACUUM
operation is forced to shrinkpg_xact
. Note that the system will launch autovacuum processes for this purpose even when autovacuum is otherwise disabled.Vacuum also allows removal of old files from the
pg_xact
subdirectory. This parameter can only be set at server start, but the setting can be reduced for individual tables by changing table storage parameters. For more information see Section 24.1.5.autovacuum_multixact_freeze_max_age
(integer 64
)Specifies the maximum age (in multixacts) that a table's
pg_class
.relminmxid
field can attain before aVACUUM
operation is forced to shrinkpg_multixact
. Note that the system will launch autovacuum processes for this purpose even when autovacuum is otherwise disabled.This parameter can only be set at server start, but the setting can be reduced for individual tables by changing table storage parameters. For more information see Section 24.1.5.1.
autovacuum_vacuum_cost_delay
(integer
)Specifies the cost delay value that will be used in automatic
VACUUM
operations. If -1 is specified, the regular vacuum_cost_delay value will be used. The default value is 20 milliseconds. This parameter can only be set in thepostgresql.conf
file or on the server command line; but the setting can be overridden for individual tables by changing table storage parameters.autovacuum_vacuum_cost_limit
(integer
)Specifies the cost limit value that will be used in automatic
VACUUM
operations. If -1 is specified (which is the default), the regular vacuum_cost_limit value will be used. Note that the value is distributed proportionally among the running autovacuum workers, if there is more than one, so that the sum of the limits for each worker does not exceed the value of this variable. This parameter can only be set in thepostgresql.conf
file or on the server command line; but the setting can be overridden for individual tables by changing table storage parameters.