Re: When does VACUUM FULL not clean out all deleted data?

James Cloos <cloos@jhcloos.com> writes:
> Right after the restore the db took up less than ten percent as much
> space as the backup.  (For the backup I stopped pg and used rsync on
> the /var/lib/postgresql/data directory.)

> Why was the db using that extra five plus gigs?

Smells like a hadn't-been-vacuuming-often-enough problem.

Please note that vacuum-full-once-in-a-long-while is *not* a substitute
for frequent-plain-vacuum, because VACUUM FULL isn't good at reducing
index space usage --- in fact it usually makes it worse.  Your numbers
didn't separate table vs index bloat, but I'm suspicious that a lot of
your problem was the latter.

            regards, tom lane