[Daryl Herzmann - Sat at 12:59:03PM -0600] > As the months have gone by, I notice many of my tables having *lots* of > unused item pointers. For example, Probably not the issue here, but we had some similar issue where we had many long-running transactions - i.e. some careless colleague entering "begin" into his psql shell and leaving it running for some days without entering "commit" or "rollback", plus some instances where the applications started a transaction without closing it. > Perhaps I shouldn't be concerned with this? In all, I've got around 400 > GB of data on postgresql, but am not sure how much of it is old data. I didn't count the zeroes, but autovacuum does have rules saying it will not touch the table until some percentages of it needs to be vacuumed off. This is of course configurable. > Do I need to be running old fashioned 'vacuumdb' routinely as well? I > guess I just don't understand why autovacuum is not automatically doing > this for me and I have tables with so many unused item pointers. If you have some period of the day with less activity than else, it is a good idea running an old-fashionated vacuum as well. The regular vacuum process will benefit from any work done by the autovacuum.
