Re: size of attributes table is too big

[Ron Johnson <ronljohnsonjr@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Mar 19, 2025 at 1:06 PM Siraj G <tosiraj.g@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hello!

I have a PG (v16) instance which is occupying around 1TB of storage. Out of this, around 350GB is occupied by the table pg_catalog.pg_attribute. 

Why is the catalog table's size so big?

Here are the sizes:

pg_attribute	338 GB
pg_attribute_relid_attnam_index	117 GB
pg_attribute_relid_attnum_index	69 GB

I think this table must have tons of dead tuples. Please suggest to me if we can purge any data/shrink the size of this table.

Run pgstattuple and pgstatindex on them.  They'll tell you how much bloat you have.

And tune your autovacuum parameters to be more aggressive.  These, for example, are my settings:

autovacuum_analyze_scale_factor = 0.015
autovacuum_vacuum_scale_factor = 0.015
autovacuum_vacuum_insert_scale_factor = 0.015
autovacuum_vacuum_insert_threshold = 250

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