Great results with 7.4.1 and auto-vacuum

Good news everyone!

Yesterday we finally upgraded to 7.4.1 from 7.3 using the RHEL 3 RPM's.
We knew that we would have to wait for at least 24 hours to get a good
picture of what was happening. This morning I noticed from our logs,
that we moved from an average load of 2.5 on our database server to a
load of consistently less than 1. Many of our standard queries are now
much, much, /*much*/ faster.

And I have to say, if you have not yet implemented pg_autovacuum, then
run and do so right now! We have about 250 tables, and perhaps 70 of
those are frequently updated (about 1 million updates and 750,000
inserts per day). The auto_vacuuming is a godsend, since we no longer
have to do table maintenance every morning.

We're looking to see how the recent changes with managing the free space
map for indices will help us, as we had to do frequent dumps and
restores on busy tables (this if faster than re-indexing or vacuum full).

The developers have done a really great job. Kudos!

Warmest regards,
Ericson Smith
Tracking Specialist/DBA
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