strange autovacuum behaviour - Mailing list pgsql-admin

From Stefano Nichele
Subject strange autovacuum behaviour
Date
Msg-id 49906B4F.5040509@gmail.com
Whole thread Raw
Responses Re: strange autovacuum behaviour  (Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@commandprompt.com>)
List pgsql-admin
Hi All,
I have a couple of questions about autovacuum/vacuum behavior.

On my production system, I set autovacuum ON since it's pretty hard to
me find a good timeframe for vacuum (the system is pretty busy over the day)
Last week the system was really slow and running vacuum manually the
performance was really improved.
So now I would like to understand why autovacuum did not work as
expected (at least for me). Any ideas ?

Other question.
Yesterday I noticed another strange thing. autovacuum was off since the
aforementioned issue and a vacuum scheduled at 06:00 UTC.
Checking pg_stat_all_tables  (last_autovacuum field) I saw that at 05:30
UTC an autovacuum was performed for almost all the tables. After 30 min
(at 06:00) vacuum started and for about 2 hours, vacuum and autovacuum
were running simultaneously.

Why autovacuum (that was OFF) started ?  For preventing transaction ID
wraparound ? Is it right that in such case all the tables are
(auto)vacuumed ?

My database is about 35 GB and the most updated table (in terms of
insert/delete/update) is indeed the biggest one (3.6 GB of data, 3.2 GB
primary key index, 1.5 GB another index) and I'm using postgres 8.2.9.

Thanks in advance for any suggestion.

Cheers,
ste



pgsql-admin by date:

Previous
From: Tom Lane
Date:
Subject: Re: database corruption help
Next
From: "John Lister"
Date:
Subject: Re: database corruption help