Thread: Starting autovacuum in postgresql-8.1.9

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I am running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and postgresql-8.1.9-1.el5 (&c.).

It seems autovacuum would be a good idea, but I cannot see how to start it,
mainly because I cannot find it. There are autovacuum settings in
postgresql.conf, but they are all commented out.

Does it suffice to turn them on and restart the postmaster? Or are they off
because autovacuum is not supported? I have looked around in the PostgreSQL
book by Douglas & Douglas and they say it is in a contrib directory, but the
one that makes sense does not seem to contain it. Is it built into the
server now, or is it to be found somewhere else? In particular, pgavd does
not exist anywhere on my system.

- -- .~.  Jean-David Beyer          Registered Linux User 85642. /V\  PGP-Key: 9A2FC99A         Registered Machine
241939./()\ Shrewsbury, New Jersey    http://counter.li.org^^-^^ 09:05:01 up 7 days, 12:27, 3 users, load average:
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Jean-David Beyer wrote:

> I am running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and postgresql-8.1.9-1.el5 (&c.).
> 
> It seems autovacuum would be a good idea, but I cannot see how to start it,
> mainly because I cannot find it. There are autovacuum settings in
> postgresql.conf, but they are all commented out.
> 
> Does it suffice to turn them on and restart the postmaster? Or are they off
> because autovacuum is not supported? I have looked around in the PostgreSQL
> book by Douglas & Douglas and they say it is in a contrib directory, but the
> one that makes sense does not seem to contain it. Is it built into the
> server now, or is it to be found somewhere else? In particular, pgavd does
> not exist anywhere on my system.

Contrib existed up to 8.0.  Autovacuum was integrated into the server in 8.1.
It seems Douglas' book covers only 8.0.

You can simply uncomment and turn it on.  Note that you will need to
enable stats_row_level too.

-- 
Alvaro Herrera                                http://www.CommandPrompt.com/
PostgreSQL Replication, Consulting, Custom Development, 24x7 support