Thread: Repercussions of Cancelled Autovacuum

Repercussions of Cancelled Autovacuum

From
Andrew Hannon
Date:
Hello,

We have a large(ish) table that had a series of delete statements executed against it (culling most of the rows in the
table).This triggered a time consuming autovacuum, which we allowed to run for 2+ days (and were planning to allow to
runto completion). However, it ended up getting cancelled unexpectedly, and is now running once again. I have some
questions:

1. My understanding is the autovacuum will block most (all?) DDL statements executed on it, and pg will cancel it if a
userrequests a conflicting lock. I don't believe either of these things occurred. Are there any other circumstances
thatwill cancel an autovacuum? 
2. Is autovacuum incremental? Or, does it effectively roll back and start fresh, having to redo all of the work of the
lastcouple of days? 

Thank you!

Andrew