On a 9.3.1 server , I have a key busy_table in that is hit by most transactions running on our system. One DB's copy of this table has 60K rows and 1/3 of that tables rows can updated every minute. Autovacuum autovacuum_analyze_scale_factor is set 0.02, so that analyse runs nearly every minute. But when autovacuum vacuum runs I sometimes see the following message in logs: LOG: automatic vacuum of table "busy_table":* index scans: 0* pages: 0 removed, 22152 remain tuples: 0 removed, 196927 remain buffer usage: 46241 hits, 478 misses, 715 dirtied avg read rate: 0.561 MB/s, avg write rate: 0.839 MB/s system usage: CPU 0.07s/0.06u sec elapsed 6.66 sec and the tuples remaining is then overestimated by a factor >3 , and have seen this over estimate as large at >20 times IE 5M This causes the query planner to then fail to get the best plan, in fact this can result in queries that take 30 Minutes that normally return in 4-6 seconds. IE it starts table scanning tables in joins to busy_table rather than using the index. As soon as following appears: LOG: automatic vacuum of table "busy_table": *index scans: 1* all is well again for the queries that follow this , but for the 20-30 user interactions during the bad period never return as they take too long. -- View this message in context: http://postgresql.1045698.n5.nabble.com/autovacuum-vacuum-creates-bad-statistics-for-planner-when-it-log-index-scans-0-tp5804416.html Sent from the PostgreSQL - performance mailing list archive at Nabble.com.