Daryl Herzmann <akrherz@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > As the months have gone by, I notice many of my tables having *lots* of > unused item pointers. For example, > There were 31046438 unused item pointers. > Total free space (including removable row versions) is 4894537260 bytes. > 580240 pages are or will become empty, including 7 at the end of the > table. > 623736 pages containing 4893544876 free bytes are potential move > destinations. This definitely looks like autovac is not getting the job done for you. The default autovac settings in 8.1 are very un-aggressive and many people find that they need to change the settings to make autovac vacuum more often. Combining autovac with the traditional approach of a cron job isn't a bad idea, either, if you have known slow times of day --- autovac doesn't currently have any concept of a maintenance window, so if you'd rather your vacuuming mostly happened at 2AM, you still need a cron job for that. regards, tom lane
