Re: how to plan for vacuum?

On Wed, Jan 24, 2007 at 02:37:44PM +0900, Galy Lee wrote:
> 1. How do we know if autovacuum is enough for my application, or should
> I setup a vacuum manually from cron for my application?

Generally I trust autovac unless there's some tables where it's critical
that they be vacuumed frequently, such as a queue table or a web session
table.

> 2. How to set the GUC parameters for autovacuum?
> There are two sets of parameters for autovacuum:
> - vacuum threshold and scale factor (500/0.2)
> ?$B!! - analyze threshold and scale factor(250/0.1)
> Is there any guideline to set these parameters? When does it need to
> change the default values?

I find those are generally pretty good starting points; just bear in
mind that it means 20% dead space.

> 3. How to tune cost-based delay vacuum?
> I had searched in performance list; it seems that most of the practices
> are based on experience / trial-and-error approach to meet the
> requirement of disk utilization or CPU utilization. Is there any other
> guild line to set them?

Unless you have a means for the database to monitor IO usage on it's
own, I don't know that we have a choice...

I'll generally start with a cost delay of 20ms and adjust based on IO
utilization.
--
Jim Nasby jim(at)nasby(dot)net
EnterpriseDB http://enterprisedb.com 512.569.9461 (cell)