Thread: idle process & autovacuum

On 10-07-30 10:52 AM, Gauthier, Dave wrote:

Hi:

 

I have a perl/dbi script that’s loading a lot of data into a DB (probably about 8,000,000 records).  pg_stat_activity shows the script’s activity alongside another process with current_query as...

 

autovacuum: ANALYZE public.instance_pins

 

The total instance_pins table cardinality is about 60,000,000.  The script inserts records but never updates or deletes anything.  And before the script runs, the table is truncated.  The script’s process seems to be stalled in the meantime.

The analyze that is running on that table will block the truncate of that until the analyze completes.  You can check pg_locks for to see if there are any ungranted locks relating to the script you are running.

 

This is a new phenomena as of yesterday. The only change is that I added an index on that table.  But I created the new index yesterday (create index...) and it completed OK.

 

What does this message mean in that context?  Is this indicative of someting being misconfigured in the DB?

 

The message means that the data in instance_pins has changed enough for autovacuum to run an analyze on the table.  It's doing this to re-generate statistics for the table for the query planner to use.

-- 
Brad Nicholson  416-673-4106
Database Administrator, Afilias Canada Corp.