"Chris Hoover" <revoohc@gmail.com> writes:
> Question, if I turn on autovacuum in PG 8.1, how do I turn it off?
> The reason behind this question is that we would love to turn it on and try
> it in our production systems. However, if we find that it is causing to
> much i/o load, we need to be able to turn it off on a moments notice with
> out stopping the database.
Not a problem, you can change the autovacuum parameters with just a
SIGHUP to the postmaster, no need to restart anything.
If you really mean you want to kill it NOW, rather than letting the
current autovac pass finish out, I think a SIGINT to the autovac
process will take care of it.
regards, tom lane