Re: Autovacuum Question

I just happened to be reading this page from the 8.1 docs:

"The autovacuum daemon, when enabled, runs every autovacuum_naptime seconds
and determines which database to process. Any database which is close to
transaction ID wraparound is immediately processed. In this case, autovacuum
issues a database-wide VACUUM call, or VACUUM FREEZE if it's a template
database, and then terminates. If no database fulfills this criterion, the
one that was least recently processed by autovacuum is chosen. In this case
each table in the selected database is checked, and individual VACUUM or
ANALYZE commands are issued as needed."

-----Original Message-----
From: pgsql-admin-owner(at)postgresql(dot)org
[mailto:pgsql-admin-owner(at)postgresql(dot)org]On Behalf Of Chris Hoover
Sent: Tuesday, May 16, 2006 1:27 PM
To: pgsql-admin(at)postgresql(dot)org
Subject: [ADMIN] Autovacuum Question

PostgreSQL 8.1.3

Question on autovacuum.

autovacuum_naptime (integer)
Specifies the delay between activity rounds for the autovacuum
subprocess. In each round the subprocess examines one database and issues
VACUUM and ANALYZE commands as needed for tables in that database. The delay
is measured in seconds, and the default is 60. This option can be set at
server start or in the postgresql.conf file.

Does this mean that each run of autovacuum will vacuum/analyze all tables
that need work in the database that autovacuum is looking at?

The reason I'm asking is that I have ~172 non system tables in each
database, so if autovacuum only does one table per run, I don't think it
will ever get caught up (since there are almost 35k tables in total).

Also, with over 200 databases, does this mean that a database will only
get checked once about every 3.5 hours, or does autovacuum run on the
database that needs the vacuuming the most?

Thanks,

Chris