Re: 12 hour table vacuums

Ron St-Pierre <ron(dot)pgsql(at)shaw(dot)ca> writes:
> The table has 140,000 rows, 130 columns (mostly NUMERIC), 60 indexes. It
> is probably our 'key' table in the database and gets called by almost
> every query (usually joined to others). The table gets updated only
> about 10 times a day. We were running autovacuum but it interfered with
> the updates to we shut it off. We vacuum this table nightly, and it
> currently takes about 12 hours to vacuum it. Not much else is running
> during this period, nothing that should affect the table.

Here is your problem:

> vacuum_cost_delay = 200

If you are only vacuuming when nothing else is happening, you shouldn't
be using vacuum_cost_delay at all: set it to 0. In any case this value
is probably much too high. I would imagine that if you watch the
machine while the vacuum is running you'll find both CPU and I/O load
near zero ... which is nice, unless you would like the vacuum to finish
sooner.

In unrelated comments:

> maintenance_work_mem = 786432

That seems awfully high, too.

> max_fsm_pages = 70000

And this possibly too low --- are you sure you are not leaking disk
space?

> stats_start_collector = off
> stats_command_string = on
> stats_block_level = on
> stats_row_level = on

These are not self-consistent.

regards, tom lane