"Dr R.Adscheid" <adscheid@rosin.com> writes:
> We are using PostgreSQL 6.3/Digital Unix 4.0B in an environment with 7x24
> availiability. There
> is one table, which has about 9000 new records per day and about 10% being
> updated. With an index over several columns the select on this table is quit
> short, but removing old entries and vacuuming is an very time
> consuming operation (about 1 hour for the whole database!) and because of
> the 7x24 production not acceptable.
A number of people have found that removing the index, vacuuming, and
recreating the index is faster than letting vacuum try to fix the
index for itself.
Another possibility is to try the "lazy vacuum" patches available from
http://people.freebsd.org/~alfred/vacfix/, though I don't fully trust
those yet. (That would require updating to 7.0.3 ... but I tell you
in all honesty that you're a fool to still be using 6.3 for anything
critical. The number of bugs fixed between 6.3 and 7.0.3 is enormous.)
regards, tom lane