Re: vacuum, vacuum full and problems releasing disk space

On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 9:42 AM, Guy Helmer
<guy.helmer@palisadesystems.com> wrote:
> On May 10, 2012, at 4:31 AM, Horaci Macias wrote:
>
>> Hi everybody,
>>
>> I'm running postgres 9.1 and having disk space problems.
>> My application captures information 24x7 and stores it into the database. This includes several bytea and can be ~5M
entriesa day, so the size can be an issue after several days. 
>> My application also cleans up entries older than 10 days; it does this every night and the delete operations are
happeningsuccessfully. I cannot truncate the tables as they contain both stale and active data. 
>> The database is able to store all the entries for ~15 days without problems, but for some reason the deletion of old
entriesis not freeing up the space (or the insertion of new entries is not reusing the space used by old entries)
becauseafter running the application for ~20days I run out of space on disk. 
>> I've been reading on this forum and the postgres documentation; vacuum full is not recommended and apparently vacuum
shouldbe all I need. I'm using autovacuum but this doesn't seem to be solving the problem (perhaps because while vacuum
isrunning the application keeps inserting entries 24x7?) 
>>
>> Just to clarify, I don't really care if the disk space is returned to the OS; what I need though is to be sure that
Ican keep a window of 10 days of records (assuming of course my HD is big enough for those 10 days, which seems to be
thecase). 
>>
>> Some questions:
>> * Although not being generally recommended, I've read that vacuum full is sometimes the only choice when large
deletionsare in place in order to maintain the database. Is this the case here? 
>> * Should I try to have a "maintenance window" and stop all inserts/writes while vacuum is running? If so, is there
anyway to configure at what time vacuum will be executed by autovacuum or should I rely on cron-type jobs for this? and
isthere any way to prevent external connections at certain times of day to make sure inserts/writes don't happen while
vacuumis going, or again I should use cron-type jobs for this? 
>> * Any other suggestions/ideas to troubleshoot this or any pointers to further documentation?
>
> I would expect a plain VACUUM to make unused space available for re-use -- not sure why it would not be helping.
>
> Since Postgresql can have tables that are children of tables, a neat trick in this situation is to create per-day
childtables and insert the new data directly into the appropriate per-day table; with this approach, deleting old data
isaccomplished by simply dropping outdated tables and thereby avoiding VACUUM completely. With constraints on the child
tables,Postgresql can optimize a query on the parent table by knowing what child table has data from what day and will
onlycheck child tables that would have data for a given query. 

+1 on this approach. it's a best practice for rotating logging tables.

merlin