Re: Disable autovacuum guc?

On 10/19/2016 06:27 PM, Joshua D. Drake wrote:
> Hello,
>
> After all these years, we are still regularly running into people who
> say, "performance was bad so we disabled autovacuum". I am not talking
> about once in a while, it is often. I would like us to consider removing
> the autovacuum option. Here are a few reasons:
>
> 1. It does not hurt anyone
> 2. It removes a foot gun
> 3. Autovacuum is *not* optional, we shouldn't let it be
> 4. People could still disable it at the table level for those tables
> that do fall into the small window of, no maintenance is o.k.
> 5. People would still have the ability to decrease the max_workers to 1
> (although I could argue about that too).

People who run data warehouses where all of the data comes in as batch
loads regularly disable autovacuum, and should do so. For the DW/batch
load use-case, it makes far more sense to do batch loads interspersed
with ANALYZEs and VACUUMS of loaded/updated tables.

--
--
Josh Berkus
Red Hat OSAS
(any opinions are my own)