Vacuum and Transactions

Hi all,

I am having the following problems using Postgres 7.1.2 with clients which
have long transactions:

If there is a transaction running when 'vacuumdb -a -z' is run (as a cron
job) it stops running at that database till the transaction completes. That
is not so much of a problem until a new client tries to connect to the
database. This new connection hangs, waiting for the vacuum to complete.
This situation is not all that helpful and means I have to be careful at
what time I run vacuum so it does not interfere with new clients. Is this a
bug or the standard way in which postgres works and are there any plans
change this?

Regards

Ben

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