Re: VARCHAR -vs- CHAR: huge performance difference?

On Thu, 2004-06-17 at 00:46, Olivier Hubaut wrote:
> On Wed, 16 Jun 2004 09:37:58 -0500 (CDT), C. Bensend  
>  wrote:
> 
> >
> >> You might want to look into the autovacuum daemon, and / or increasing
> >> fsm settings to be large enough to hold all the spare tuples released by
> >> vacuuming.
> >
> > IIRC, the autovacuum stuff was added in 7.4, which I'm not running (yet).
> > An upgrade to 7.4.3 might be prudent for me, while the database is still
> > small.
> >
> > Benny
> >
> >
> 
> By the way, be carefull. The pg_autovacuum is not good enough for being  
> using as the only way for cleaning the database, especially if you have a  
> lot of update and delete on the same tables.

The problem here isn't pg_autovacuum, but too small of settings for
fsm.  I've run multi-day tests where autovacuum kept the size of the
database pretty much the same with 200+ updates a second going on.