Re: autovacuum?

Jan Danielsson wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> I usually run "vaccumdb --all --analyze --quiet" as a part of my
> daily maintenance. While reading up a little on vacuumdb, I saw a
> reference to "autovacuum", which seemed interesting.
>
> Apparently, by enabling autovacuum in postgresql.conf, there's a
> deamon that will check if vacuuming is required or not, and run the
> vacuuming process as needed.
>
> Quick questions: Do I simply need to enable autovacuum in the
> postgresql.conf file, or is there more to it? Will it vacuum all
> databases, or do I need to specify which ones? If so, how?
>

Yes and no.

Setting autovacuum=on will enable the autovacuum to work but you may
want to adjust some other options to suit your needs.

You will find about 7 other options (starting with autovacuum_) in
postgresql.conf that you can use to fine tune the behaviour.

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.1/interactive/runtime-config-autovacuum.html

Normally it will be applied to every database but you can use the
pg_autovacuum system catalog to limit it's use.

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/interactive/catalog-pg-autovacuum.html