"HT" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > We have quite large production Postgres 7.2 DB which is out of control in > terms of disk consumption. We made it thru the holiday shopping season, > but it isn't over yet. We have taken the DB down once for a vacuum analyze > but only vacuum'd 2 large tables which took FIVE HOURS WITH NO > RESULTS.
1. You don't need to take down the DB to do vacuuming. 2. What do you mean by "WITH NO RESULTS"? > Posts to the newsgroup advised that I crank up the max_fsm_pages. Right > now it is at roughly 65,000. > select relname, relpages from pg_class where relkind in ('r', 't', 'i') > users | 408711 > merchant_sessions | 236333 > batch_load_awaiting | 173785 > orders | 92241 If you have not been vacuuming regularly then these relpages figures cannot be trusted too much, but it looks to me like you might need max_fsm_pages nearer to 1 million than 64k. If it's not large enough to cover all (or at least nearly all) pages with free space, then you'll have space-leakage problems. What is the tuple update/deletion rate in these tables, anyway? Also, you should probably think about updating to 7.3.1 sometime soon. There's a performance problem in the 7.2.* FSM code that shows up when a single table has more than ~10000 pages with useful amounts of free space --- VACUUM takes an unreasonable amount of time to record the free space. regards, tom lane ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 2: you can get off all lists at once with the unregister command (send "unregister YourEmailAddressHere" to [EMAIL PROTECTED])