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From: "John Lister" <john.lister-ps@kickstone.com>
To: "Tom Lane" <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
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Subject: Re: controlling autovacuum during the day. 
Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2008 14:28:07 -0000
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> "John Lister" <john.lister-ps@kickstone.com> writes:
>> I'd like to use autovacuum to clean up the tables rather than schedule a
>> full vacuum with cron as it will be more selective/intelligent about what
>> gets cleaned. But is it possible to stop it running during peak/office
>> hours?
>
> No.  Instead, set the vacuum cost parameters to make it run slow enough
> to not interfere too much with your work.

Cheers for the quick reply. I've tweaked them quite a bit, but we have quite 
a few heavily updated tables that i'd like vacuuming to keep them in check. 
Unfortunately the autovacuum does a FULL vacuum every so often locking the 
tables for quite a long time, i'd like to move these to the evening if 
possible.

I guess the only option is to add the big tables to the pg_autovacuum table 
and run a script to enable them in the evening?
I guess autovacuum picks up changes to the pg_autovacuum table...

Is a global flag something that could be added to a future release? Or is it 
possible to get the autovacuum/db process to reload the config file while 
running using pg_reload_conf() for example?