Thread: Confirming the autovacuum daemon is running

Hi,

What is the proper way to confirm that the autovacuum daemon
is running?  I just turned autovacuuming on and don't notice
another process with ps.

Thanks.


Karl <kop@meme.com>
Free Software:  "You don't pay back, you pay forward."
                  -- Robert A. Heinlein

"Karl O. Pinc" <kop@meme.com> writes:
> What is the proper way to confirm that the autovacuum daemon
> is running?  I just turned autovacuuming on and don't notice
> another process with ps.

The autovac process doesn't run continuously, so you wouldn't
necessarily see it in ps.  (The postmaster spawns a new one
every autovacuum_naptime seconds.)

            regards, tom lane

On 02/08/2006 06:06:25 PM, Tom Lane wrote:
> "Karl O. Pinc" <kop@meme.com> writes:
> > What is the proper way to confirm that the autovacuum daemon
> > is running?
>
> The autovac process doesn't run continuously, so you wouldn't
> necessarily see it in ps.

Thanks.

I suppose then if I really wanted to I could look at frozen
transaction ids or something.

Considering how important vacuuming is, it might be nice to
have an entry in the postmaster startup log or something
that confirms vacuuming is actually happening.   Better yet
something that says that it is _not_ turned
on, because if it is turned on and things go bad
I presume that then they'll be an indication in the
logs.  Done that way, when there are vacuum problems,
regardless of why, there'll always be something in
the log.

Karl <kop@meme.com>
Free Software:  "You don't pay back, you pay forward."
                  -- Robert A. Heinlein

I would be "nice" if vacuum/analyze recorded in a table pg_vacuum (for example) the last time it ran and some stats for
each table

Jim

---------- Original Message -----------
From: "Karl O. Pinc" <kop@meme.com>
To: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Cc: pgsql-general@postgresql.org
Sent: Thu, 09 Feb 2006 00:31:57 +0000
Subject: Re: [GENERAL] Confirming the autovacuum daemon is running

> On 02/08/2006 06:06:25 PM, Tom Lane wrote:
> > "Karl O. Pinc" <kop@meme.com> writes:
> > > What is the proper way to confirm that the autovacuum daemon
> > > is running?
> >
> > The autovac process doesn't run continuously, so you wouldn't
> > necessarily see it in ps.
>
> Thanks.
>
> I suppose then if I really wanted to I could look at frozen
> transaction ids or something.
>
> Considering how important vacuuming is, it might be nice to
> have an entry in the postmaster startup log or something
> that confirms vacuuming is actually happening.   Better yet
> something that says that it is _not_ turned
> on, because if it is turned on and things go bad
> I presume that then they'll be an indication in the
> logs.  Done that way, when there are vacuum problems,
> regardless of why, there'll always be something in
> the log.
>
> Karl <kop@meme.com>
> Free Software:  "You don't pay back, you pay forward."
>                   -- Robert A. Heinlein
>
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------- End of Original Message -------