DomainKey-Signature: a=rsa-sha1; c=nofws; d=gmail.com; s=gamma;
	h=message-id:date:from:to:subject:cc:in-reply-to:mime-version:content-type:content-transfer-encoding:content-disposition:references;
	b=tM4DfXqqRPwjOuTYbg1PkaAC2HRzF+OhsMeorpaOvfkRy4EBYbMcwgPmE8+qPs3KuukwVOKQUwc1GtsCuHgcQD+3UD+ru2HPhP0RojT+bHaQxfr/ynK1qmNekZ+2XuqZuhaoB7+CdXEGG9ggdoS2jbHVzcKVpboVobOA79otvo4=
Message-ID: <fd145f7d0804181034j50ffb420s4b4144636d886087@mail.gmail.com>
Date: Fri, 18 Apr 2008 10:34:57 -0700
From: "Jeffrey Baker" <jwbaker@gmail.com>
To: "Tom Lane" <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Subject: Re: 3-days-long vacuum of 20GB table
Cc: pgsql-performance@postgresql.org
In-Reply-To: <fd145f7d0804181032w5dd56caj608866297120984a@mail.gmail.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Content-Disposition: inline
References: <fd145f7d0804180935w7d0052degf79a9660b043c084@mail.gmail.com>
	<3630.1208538238@sss.pgh.pa.us>
	<fd145f7d0804181032w5dd56caj608866297120984a@mail.gmail.com>

On Fri, Apr 18, 2008 at 10:32 AM, Jeffrey Baker <jwbaker@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Fri, Apr 18, 2008 at 10:03 AM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
>  > "Jeffrey Baker" <jwbaker@gmail.com> writes:
>  >  > This autovacuum has been hammering my server with purely random i/o
>  >  > for half a week.  The table is only 20GB and the i/o subsystem is good
>  >  > for 250MB/s sequential and a solid 5kiops.  When should I expect it to
>  >  > end (if ever)?
>  >
>  >  What have you got maintenance_work_mem set to?  Which PG version
>  >  exactly?
>
>  This is 8.1.9 on Linux x86_64,
>
>  # show maintenance_work_mem ;
>   maintenance_work_mem
>  ----------------------
>   16384

That appears to be the default.  I will try increasing this.  Can I
increase it globally from a single backend, so that all other backends
pick up the change, or do I have to restart the instance?

-jwb