I'm in the process of archiving data on one of my PG machines. After backing up the data, I delete the old records and then run a "vacuum full" on each table. I'm vacuuming the first table now and it is taking much longer than I expected (I'm now past the 2-hour mark). Some info: Version: 8.1.2 On-disk table size: ~1.9GB Records deleted from the table: 10,290,892 (~60% of records) Physical memory: 2GB Connection maintenance_work_mem: 1GB Table indexes: 7 CPU: Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.00GHz Disk: 2x200GB SATA as RAID-1 using 3-ware card The vacuum full is the only significant load on the server at the moment (PG or otherwise). IO is probably the bottleneck as CPU is running near 50% idle and 40% wait-state with PG using in the 5-15% range. So.... What amount of time might I expect to wait for this process to complete? Should I be changing settings other than maintenance_work_mem? What is the effect of the indexes and would dropping and recreating them help? Other suggestions? Cheers, Steve
