I have a large table (billions of records) which has not been vacuum and bloated.
Vacuum scale factor was left at the default.
I ran a vacuum on a DEV system and it makes several passes (scanning heap/vacuuming indexes/vacumming heap) which take more than an hour each.
On a PROD system, I may have to kill the job midway.
Should I reduce the autovacuum_work_mem of my session? Currently 1GB
Increase if you can. You want to maximize the work being done before it needs to pause.
Have you tuned any settings related to vacuum? If your I/O system can handle it, turning cost delay very low, especially PG12+ where it can be less than 1ms, may be helpful. Otherwise you might reduce to 1ms and also increase cost limit so you do more work before stopping.
