I am doing lots of INSERTs on a table that starts out empty (I did a TRUNCATE on it). I am not, AFAIK, doing DELETEs or UPDATEs. Autovacuum is on. I moved logging up to debug2 level to see what was going on, and I get things like this: "vl_as": scanned 3000 of 5296 pages, containing 232944 live rows and 1033 dead rows; 3000 rows in sample, 411224 estimated total rows A little later, it says: "vl_as": scanned 3000 of 6916 pages, containing 233507 live rows and 493 dead rows; 3000 rows in sample, 538311 estimated total rows (I suppose that means autovacuum is working.) Is this normal, or have I got something wrong? Why so many dead rows when just doing inserts? It is not that I think the number is too high, considering the number of rows in the table at the point where I copied this line. It is just that I do not understand why there are any. I could easily understand it if I were doing UPDATEs. postgresql-8.1.9-1.el5 -- .~. Jean-David Beyer Registered Linux User 85642. /V\ PGP-Key: 9A2FC99A Registered Machine 241939. /( )\ Shrewsbury, New Jersey http://counter.li.org ^^-^^ 11:15:01 up 18 days, 4:33, 4 users, load average: 6.18, 5.76, 5.26 ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 3: Have you checked our extensive FAQ? http://www.postgresql.org/docs/faq