On Fri, 22 Aug 2003, Claudio Lapidus wrote:
> Bruno Wolff III wote:
> > On Fri, Aug 22, 2003 at 12:17:41 +0530,
> > Shridhar Daithankar <shridhar_daithankar@persistent.co.in> wrote:
> > >
> > > Idea of autovacuum is to reduce load on vacuum full. If you set
> shared_buffers
> > > higher and FSM properly for he update/delete load, autovacuum is
> expected to
> > > catch most of the dead tuples in shared cache only. If it is successful
> in
> > > doubling the frequency on vacuum full, that's a big win, isn't it?
> >
> > If you run a normal vacuum often enough, you shouldn't need to regularly
> > run vacuum full.
>
> Hmm, here we have a certain table, sort of FIFO, rows get inserted all the
> time, lay there for a couple of hours and get deleted "the other end
> around". We run normal vacuum almost constantly, but the table keeps
> growing. We had to implement a 'vacuum full' once a week to keep it under
> control.
You may just need to increase your fsm settings in postgresql.conf to get
a regular vacuum to work the way you want.