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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 15:20:41 -0000
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> "John Lister" <john.lister-ps@kickstone.com> writes:
>> 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.
>
> Huh?  Autovacuum *never* does VACUUM FULL.

bizarre... Its been turned off for a while, but from memory the autovacuum 
process was causing the table it was running on to be locked  - I assumed 
this was an equivalent to VACUUM FULL - causing all other connections to 
wait until it had finished. Could this happen another way, i thought the 
other vacuum options acted passively... I'll turn it back on and see what 
happens...