"John Lister" <john.lister-ps@kickstone.com> wrote:
> I'm using 8.3.8
That's recent. :-) If you have index bloat you either have some
process has held open a database transaction for a very long time
while the table underwent updates or deletes, or your vacuum policy
is not aggressive enough.
> my indexes seem to grow disproportionately to the size of the
> tables, but I haven't studied it in detail yet - I was trying to
> increase performance on a number of tables that seem to be
> extremely bloated for some reason.
Well, if they're already extremely bloated, you may need to use
CLUSTER or some other technique to recover; but it is important to
understand how you got into that state so you can avoid doing it
again.
By the way, how are you measuring bloat, and how extreme is it?
-Kevin