Re: Memory usage of auto-vacuum

On Sat, 2011-07-09 at 11:00 +0200, Gael Le Mignot wrote:
> Hello Guillaume!
>
> Sat, 09 Jul 2011 10:53:14 +0200, you wrote:
>
> > I don't quite understand how you can get up to 1GB used by your process.
> > According to your configuration, and unless I'm wrong, it shouldn't take
> > more than 40MB. Perhaps a bit more, but not 1GB. So, how did you find
> > this number?
>
> Looking at "top" we saw the postgres process growing and growing and
> then shrinking back, and doing a "select * from pg_stat_activity;" in
> parallel of the growing we found only the "vacuum analyze" query running.
>

There is not only one postgres process. So you first need to be sure
that it's the one that executes the autovacuum.

> But maybe we drawn the conclusion too quickly, I'll try disabling the
> auto vacuum to see if we really get rid of the problem doing it.
>

Disabling the autovacuum is usually a bad idea. You'll have to execute
VACUUM/ANALYZE via cron, which could get hard to configure.

BTW, what's your PostgreSQL release? I assume at least 8.3 since you're
using FTS?

--
Guillaume
http://blog.guillaume.lelarge.info
http://www.dalibo.com