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Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2020 00:43:25 +0000
From: Wayne Cuddy <lists-pgsql@useunix.net>
To: PostgreSQL <pgsql-sql@postgresql.org>
Subject: autovacuum processes not spawning
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Version: PGSQL-TimescaleDB 9.6
OS: Debian Linux, Kernel 4.9.0

Been running happily on a fairly busy server for quite some time. Aside
from the occasional hardware issues it's been very stable.

Last Friday we noticed we had performance issues with tables that are
usually never a problem. Nothing changed WRT our application with is
quite predictable. We determined that on Thursday night autovacuum
processes were no longer starting. Our server is configured to log
whenever AV runs start as well as log all durations. The autovacuum
launcher process was still running and there were no errors in the log.
We could manually initially vacuums and they would run to completion
without error.

Today we bounced the database process and it's now running autovacuums
at regular intervals and performance is what we expect.

Has anyone else had autovacuums just stop launching?

Is there a way to restart the autovacuum launcher without restarting
the entire database?

I'm not positive it's the launcher but I have nothing else to blame at
this point.

Wayne