Paul Lathrop <plathrop@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > ... When I joined the company last year, the databases were > deployed on 12-disk RAID5 arrays on dual-proc AMD machines with 4Gb of > RAM, running Debian Woody and Postgres 7.2. These systems seemed to > suffer a gradually decreasing performance accompanied by a gradually > growing disk space usage. The DBA had come to the conclusion that the > VACUUM command did/does not work on these systems, because even after a > VACUUM FULL, the size of the database was continually increasing. The very first thing you need to do is get off 7.2. After that, I'd recommend looking at *not* using VACUUM FULL. FULL is actually counterproductive in a lot of scenarios, because it shrinks the tables at the price of bloating the indexes. And 7.2's poor ability to reuse index space turns that into a double whammy. Have you checked into the relative sizes of tables and indexes and tracked the trend over time? regards, tom lane
