Kiriakos Tsourapas wrote: > When the problem appears, vacuuming is not helping. I ran vacuum > manually and the problem was still there. Only full vacuum worked. > > As far as I have understood, autovacuuming is NOT doing FULL > vacuum. So, messing around with its values should not help me in > any way. That is absolutely wrong. A regular vacuum, or autovacuum not hopelessly crippled by your configuration, will prevent the table bloat which is slowing things down. It does not, however, fix bloat once it has occurred; a normal vacuum then is like closing the barn door after the horse has already bolted -- it would have prevented the problem if done in time, but it won't cure it. A VACUUM FULL in version 8.4 will fix bloat of the table's heap, but will tend to bloat the indexes. You should probably fix your autovcauum configuration (making it *at least* as aggressive as the default), CLUSTER the affected table(s) to fix both table and index bloat, and schedule an upgrade to the latest bug fix release of major version 8.4. http://www.postgresql.org/support/versioning/ Minor releases (where the version number only changes after the second dot) only contain fixes for bugs and security problems, and never require a dump/load or pg_upgrade run. If you insist on running with known bugs, you can expect problems. -Kevin -- Sent via pgsql-performance mailing list (pgsql-performance@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-performance