Re: Autovacuum in the backend

On Thu, 16 Jun 2005, Alvaro Herrera wrote:

> On Thu, Jun 16, 2005 at 04:20:34PM +1000, Gavin Sherry wrote:
>
> > 2) By no fault of its own, autovacuum's level of granularity is the table
> > level. For people dealing with non-trivial amounts of data (and we're not
> > talking gigabytes or terabytes here), this is a serious drawback. Vacuum
> > at peak times can cause very intense IO bursts -- even with the
> > enhancements in 8.0. I don't think the solution to the problem is to give
> > users the impression that it is solved and then vacuum their tables during
> > peak periods. I cannot stress this enough.
>
> People running systems with petabyte-sized tables can disable autovacuum
> for those tables, and leave it running for the rest. Then they can
> schedule whatever maintenance they see fit on their gigantic tables.
> Trying to run a database with more than a dozen gigabytes of data
> without expert advice (or at least reading the manual) would be
> extremely stupid anyway.

As I've said a few times, I'm not concerned about such users. I'm
concerned about users with some busy tables of a few hundred megabytes. I
still don't think VACUUM at arbitary times on such tables is suitable.

Thanks,

Gavin