Tom, Thanks for the advice. I'll track it over the next couple weeks and see what comes up. Mark On Tue, 2006-05-09 at 17:01 -0400, Tom Lane wrote: > <mark.dingee@xxxxxxx> writes: > > I had an odd situation occur this morning with PGSQL 7.4 run on Red Hat Enterprise 4 (update 3) and could really use some wisdom. > > > ... Single postmaster running. > > ... vacuum full is run every night as part of a cron job > > ... At start, data files consume about 28 GB > > ... This morning I dropped the database and reloaded from current backup > > ... New instance consumes about 6 GB > > > I can only assume that the database was not compacted, but I thought vacuum full performed that function along with tuple maintenance. Can anyone expound on the problem and suggest a solution other than dropping and reloading the database? > > The evidence is mostly gone now, but what I'd suggest is waiting a while > to see if it bloats again, and if so finding out exactly *where* the > bloat is. Make some notes now about the sizes of your tables and > indexes, and see what's getting larger. > > My guess offhand is that the problem is index bloat. VACUUM FULL not > only doesn't help much with that, it tends to make it worse. If the > database size is supposed to be fairly stable, you'd probably be better > off with a maintenance regime that doesn't use VACUUM FULL but just > plain VACUUM. Make sure your FSM settings are high enough. > > regards, tom lane
