Scott Marlowe <scott.marlowe@gmail.com> writes:
> All of this is completely besides the point that a database that's
> been shutdown immediately / had the power cord yanked comes back up
> and doesn't start autovacuuming automatically, which seems a
> non-optimal behaviour.
It'll start as soon as you've modified enough rows. The absolute worst
case behavior is that table bloat reaches twice the level it would have
otherwise, or pg_statistic data becomes twice as out of date as it would
have otherwise.
Now, if your server's MTBF is less than the autovac interval, you could
indeed have an accumulating problem ... but I suggest that in that
situation you've got other issues to fix.
regards, tom lane