On Fri, 2025-01-17 at 11:45 +0530, Siraj G wrote: > The PgSQL version is 16 and it runs in Cloud SQL managed by GCP. > > Problem was that we were unable to conveniently get the object details in the > schema browser (within the Cloud SQL Studio) as it was getting timeout again > and again. Several application jobs start to fail. Eventually we found that > pg_catalog.pg_attribute was having tons of dead tuples. While vacuum on this > took several hours, the problem got resolved eventually. > Command ran: vacuum pg_attribute; > > I would like to understand how this issue can be prevented. We do have > autovacuum ON and I could see the last vacuum on this table was just about > 30hrs back. > > Appreciate any suggestions. I can only guess, but my guess is that you are creating temporary tables very frequently. Creating a temporary table insers the columns into "pg_attribute", and they get deleted again when the session ends. Perhaps autovacuum was just not fast enough, perhaps there were long-running transactions or queries that prevented autovacuum from cleaning up the dead rows in "pg_attribute". Make sure your transactions are short and that autovacuum is configured sufficiently aggressive. Yours, Laurenz Albe
