Re: Fillfactor effectiveness on existing table - Mailing list pgsql-general

From David G. Johnston
Subject Re: Fillfactor effectiveness on existing table
Date
Msg-id CAKFQuwYppwZRZQ128T+z638iMNGYcuLGHw42DD_AKSTnZu9QVQ@mail.gmail.com
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In response to Fillfactor effectiveness on existing table  (Durgamahesh Manne <maheshpostgres9@gmail.com>)
Responses Re: Fillfactor effectiveness on existing table
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On Tuesday, February 10, 2026, Durgamahesh Manne <maheshpostgres9@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi 

I added fillfactor with less than 100 to existing table then ran vacuum full to take effect 

How to ensure the applied fillfactor is working successfully 

A ratio of hot updates in catalog table should higher than value of n_dead_tup or n_tup_upd? Or what ?


While free space on the page is necessary for HOT, it is not sufficient.

If you want to prove fillfactor isn’t buggy I’d suggest contriving a test case instead inspecting complex real data.  A table with a single bigint and say 50 fillfactor should be easily visible when inspecting the free space of a page in the heap (not sure of the exact query for this though).  There is a page-inspect contrib extension that provides low-level details.

David J.

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