I have a largish postgresql (8.3) instance with autovacuum turned on. I am doing some heavy importing and I want to vacuum the relevant tables manually since autovacuum seems to trigger the vacuum in the middle of the import process which slows things down.
Now, the problem is that I cannot turn autovacuum off! I have tried to set autovacuum = off at postgresql.conf with no avail. I have also tried to disable the vacuum by inserting rows to pg_autovacuum but still the vacuum processes just pop up. What's even more weird is that autovacuum is vacuuming the same tables over and over. No sign of xid wraparound issues show in the logs. How can I stop autovacuum without restarting the database instance?