One issue is that pg_toast tables can't vacuum rows until their respective rows have been deleted by vacuuming the base table. But it's still odd that the count decreases by 4 each time you run it. As for the length of time, that could be due to heavily loaded hardware. You might do better if you increase vacuum_memory (or whatever the setting was called in 7.4...) That index does have about 20% bloat though; so a reindex would probably be a good idea. You might ask on the slony list... On Fri, Nov 25, 2005 at 02:34:45PM +0100, Florian G. Pflug wrote: > Hi > > We started a VACUUM (not a VACUUM FULL) on one of your postgres 7.4.9 > databases a few days ago. It's still running yet, and says the > folloing about once per second: > > INFO: index "pg_toast_2144146_index" now contains 1971674 row versions > in 10018 pages > DETAIL: 4 index row versions were removed. > 2489 index pages have been deleted, 0 are currently reusable. > > The number of row versions decreases by 4 each time the message is logged. > > The file belonging to pg_toast_2144146_index has about 80MB, > for pg_toast_2144146 there are 6 files, five of them are > 1GB, the last one is about 5MB in size. The "original" relation > (the one that references pg_toast_2144146 in it's reltoastrelid field) > has one datafile of 11MB. > > The "original" relation is called image, and is defined the following: > Table "public.image" > Column | Type | Modifiers > ---------------+------------------------+----------- > id | bigint | not null > image_code_id | bigint | > mandant_id | bigint | > name | text | > dat | text | > mime | text | > size | bigint | > md5 | bytea | > path | text | > copyright | character varying(255) | > Indexes: > "image_pkey" primary key, btree (id) > "i_image_id" btree (id) > Triggers: > _gti_denyaccess_17 BEFORE INSERT OR DELETE OR UPDATE ON image FOR > EACH ROW EXECUTE PROCEDURE _gti.denyaccess('_gti') > > The table is part of a slony tableset, which is subscribed on this database. > > Is there a reason that this vacuum takes so long? Maybe some lock > contention because slony replicates into this table? > > greetings, Florian Pflug -- Jim C. Nasby, Sr. Engineering Consultant jnasby@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Pervasive Software http://pervasive.com work: 512-231-6117 vcard: http://jim.nasby.net/pervasive.vcf cell: 512-569-9461