On Mon, 25 Aug 2003, Jeff Boes wrote:
> >One action we have consiously not done is "REINDEX" on the
> >table. We want to avoid that as far as possible.
>
> Why? It's usually a very painless step, unless the table has millions and
> millions of rows. We reindex tables with multiple indexes and several million
> rows on a weekly basis. The only downside is that the table seems to be quite
> "busy" during the process, which only takes a few minutes.
>
> AFAIK, VACUUM doesn't reclaim space taken up by indexes. In fact, the more
> deletes you do, the larger the index space gets, and the *slower* the index
> performs. A periodic REINDEX cleans up a lot of problems.
Note that in 7.4 the fix for this is in, so if you have a chance to test
it out with your indexes and their growth problem please test it to see if
it works right.
I haven't tested 7.4 beta1 yet very hard, just on my workstation, with
relatively low level stuff.