On Tue, 6 May 2003, SZUCS Gabor wrote:
> Dear Achilleus,
>
> Dunno, it's a multiuser environment. However, I'll try asking everyone to
> stop working for a minute...
>
> ... oops, I just see that it finished about half an hour before (taking an
> amazing 76 minutes for ALTER TABLE to complete). About that time, I started
> and exited a client. Seems it solved the problem. Now "vacuum full analyze"
> finished in a couple of seconds.
>
> Do you have any idea about an explanation? Does vacuum wait for the end of
> each and every transaction?
Both alter table and vacuum full want to take exclusive locks on the
table IIRC. If say that transaction that was idle had done *anything* on
the table and was sitting open after that, both of those would wait until
the transaction released the lock.