"John Lister" <john.lister-ps@kickstone.com> writes:
> Hi, I'm running 8.3.9 on ubuntu with autovacuum enabled and seemingly working properly., however I've started
gettingmessages saying that I'm near the transaction limit and I need to do a database wide vacuum, which I've started.
> From reading the docs, though I thought that autovacuum would do this on my behalf, is this true?
It's supposed to. Did you look around to see if AV was trying to do
anything?
It's possible you got bit by this recently-fixed bug, which caused any
large-scale autovacuum operation to take unreasonably long to complete:
Author: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Branch: master [b58c25055] 2010-11-19 22:28:20 -0500
Branch: REL9_0_STABLE Release: REL9_0_2 [b5efc0940] 2010-11-19 22:28:25 -0500
Branch: REL8_4_STABLE Release: REL8_4_6 [fab2af30d] 2010-11-19 22:28:30 -0500
Branch: REL8_3_STABLE Release: REL8_3_13 [6cb9d5113] 2010-11-19 22:28:35 -0500
Fix leakage of cost_limit when multiple autovacuum workers are active.
When using default autovacuum_vac_cost_limit, autovac_balance_cost relied
on VacuumCostLimit to contain the correct global value ... but after the
first time through in a particular worker process, it didn't, because we'd
trashed it in previous iterations. Depending on the state of other autovac
workers, this could result in a steady reduction of the effective
cost_limit setting as a particular worker processed more and more tables,
causing it to go slower and slower. Spotted by Simon Poole (bug #5759).
Fix by saving and restoring the GUC variables in the loop in do_autovacuum.
In passing, improve a few comments.
Back-patch to 8.3 ... the cost rebalancing code has been buggy since it was
put in.
regards, tom lane