Thanks to those who answered my first question. I am looking at implementing autovacuuming on our new production 8.1.3 systems. I am reading the documentation on the various configuration parameters. The autovacuum_analyze_threshold and autovacuum_vacuum_threshold talk about the number of updated and deleted tuples. Is there anyway to calculate these numbers in a running database?
The reason I'm asking is that we are having some sporadic slowness issues with our databases, and I'm wanting to see how the database looks during these times. I know that vacuuming some specific tables tends to fix the problem. So, if I can see what autovacuum might see, I could set the parameters correctly to try and fix the issue.