On Tue, Feb 26, 2008 at 3:11 PM, Stuart Brooks <stuartb@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > >> ERROR: canceling autovacuum task > >> CONTEXT: automatic vacuum of table "metadb.test.transactions" > > > > Are these happening regularly? They indicate that something is > > happening on the table that collides with what autovacuum needs to do, > > and autovacuum defers its task. For this to happen you need to be doing > > ALTER TABLE or similar however; normal UPDATE/INSERT/DELETE should not > > cause autovacuum to cancel itself. > > > I am not using an ALTER table command but I am doing periodic ANALYZEs > to evaluate the table size. Could this be causing the problem? I notice > that stopping the ANALYZE calls appears to eliminate the canceled > autovacuum. > I am trying to reproduce the case here, but could not. Can you post the table schema and the operations you are carrying out ? Is it just INSERT new rows and DELETE old rows or are there any UPDATEs too ? Are there any long running transactions open ? > What concerns me is that once the size has grown, even a VACUUM FULL > doesn't recover the space. Regular external VACUUMs keep the table at > around 10MB but if I use autovacuum and it grows to 40MB, a VACUUM FULL > will only get it down to 35MB. Is it possible that a canceled autovacuum > could result in permanently lost space? > AFAIK it should not. Can you also post VACUUM FULL VERBOSE output ? Thanks, Pavan -- Pavan Deolasee EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 5: don't forget to increase your free space map settings