Re: Autovacuum on by default?

Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> Is it time to turn on autovacuum by default in 8.2? I know we wanted to
> be on the side of caution with 8.1, but perhaps we should evaluate the
> experiences now. Comments?

Would be fine by me, but I'm curious to see what the community has to
say. A few comments:

Autovacuum can cause unpredictable performance issues, that is if it
vacuums in the middle of a busy day and people don't want that, of
course they turn it off easy enough, but they might be surprised.

I haven't played with CVS HEAD much, but I think the logging issue has
been addressed no? That is my single biggest gripe with the 8.1
autovacuum is that it's very hard to see if it's actually done anything
without having to turn up the logging significantly.

The remaining big ticket items for autovacuum are the maintenance window
that Alvaro and I have just been discussing, and multiple concurrent
vacuum, (possibly you could add the continued reduction of vacuum impact
but that just a constant thing). Do we think it's worth waiting for
either of these two features prior to turning on autovacuum by default?

Matt