On 30/01/2011, at 12:27, Craig Ringer wrote:
OK, so you're pre-8.4 , which means you have the max_fsm settings to play with. Have you seen any messages in the logs about the free space map (fsm)? If your install didn't have a big enough fsm to keep track of deleted tuples, you'd face massive table bloat that a regular vacuum couldn't fix.
Ouch. You're absolutely right. There are messages about max_fsm_pages in the postgres log. It's currently set to 153600. According to the documentation, I can increase it up to 200000. Will that even help? How do I find out how many I need to set it to?