Thread: Vacuum Looping 7.4

I have a situation where a VACUUM VERBOSE ANALYZE of table
loops on the table and its indexes.

There are inserts happening on the table while the vacuum
is going on.  We sure that there are no other vacuums or
re-indexing going on.

>From the archives, the only similar case
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-novice/2004-10/msg00104.php
had Tom suggesting to increase vacuum mem.
Our vacuum mem is very high.

The log is attached.  Any insight would be helpful.
My ideas are to 1) turn off verbose (but then we can't
see the looping) 2) possibly use vacuum full so that
it locks the table and goes ideally quickly once through.

--elein
elein@varlena.com

elein@varlena.com (elein) writes:
> Our vacuum mem is very high.

Define "very high".  I'm wondering if it's too high, as in large enough
to overflow an int when multiplied by 1K.  It looks to me like the thing
is cleaning indexes after traversing each individual heap page, which it
would not do unless it thought it had filled up vacuum_mem.
        regards, tom lane