Mark Stosberg wrote:
Let me ask the question a different way: Is simply setting the two values plus enabling autovacuuming generally enough, or is further tweaking common place?
No, most people in addition to setting those two GUC settings also lower the threshold values (there is a fair amount of discussion on this in the lists) the defaults are not aggressive enough, so you tables probably aren't getting vacuumed often enough to keep up with the load.
Some work loads also require that you do cron based vacuuming of specific highly active tables.
Perhaps I'll give it another tree when we upgrade to 8.2.
Autovacuum is still somewhat new, and there were some significant improvements in 8.2 so yes you should give it another try.
