First, I'd like to thank Bill and Alvaro as well as you for your replies.
Quoting Tom Lane:
> Hmm. Given the churn rate on the table, I'm having a very hard time
> believing that you don't need to vacuum it pretty dang often. Maybe the
> direction you need to be moving is to persuade autovac to vacuum it
> *more* often, not less often, so that the time needed to finish each
> vacuum is small enough.
>
Other than reclaiming disk space, is there any advantage to vacuum? Is a
vacuumed table more efficient? So far, every time it vacuums - which is
around every 15-20 minutes under load conditions - it slows down
processing. I think perhaps Bill's suggestion of just scheduling the
vacuums myself (e.g. 1-2am, off peak) coupled with cost-based vacuuming
might be a good answer? Unless I'm missing an important point about
vacuuming.
Alvaro and Bill both suggested scheduling analyzes on a minute-by-minute
cron. Would this be no different than automatic analyze? No extra
overhead for connection, perhaps?
Thanks,
Herouth