Re: Still recommending daily vacuum...

Michael Paesold wrote:
> Alvaro Herrera wrote:
>> So what you are proposing above amounts to setting scale factor = 0.05.
>> The threshold is unimportant -- in the case of a big table it matters
>> not if it's 0 or 1000, it will be almost irrelevant in calculations. In
>> the case of small tables, then the table will be vacuumed in almost
>> every iteration if the threshold is 0, which is fine because the table
>> is small anyway. So why not let the threshold be 0 and be done with it?
>
> For very small tables, setting a threshold of 0 could mean a vacuum
> after every single row update (or every other row). I think that is just
> burning cycles. What about a threshold of 10 or 50, to have at least
> some sanity limit? Even though the cost of vacuum of a small table is
> low, it is still not free, IMHO, no?

A bit off-topic (because probably not realistic in a 8.3 timeframe) -
but maybe the threshold should be specified in terms of "expected number of
pages to be freed", instead specifing a bias for the number of modified
rows as it is done now. Then "1" would probably be a reasonable default, because
a vacuum that won't free at least one page seems to be not really worth
the effort - it won't safe any future IO bandwith.

Just an idea I got while following this thread...

greetings, Florian Pflug