Re: db growing out of proportion

On Thu, 29 May 2003, Tomas Szepe wrote:

> Hello everybody,
>
> I'm facing a simple yet gravely problem with postgresql 7.3.2 on x86 Linux.
> My db is used to store IP accounting statistics for about 30 C's.  There are
> a couple truly trivial tables such as the one below:
>
> CREATE TABLE stats_min
> (
>     ip    inet        NOT NULL,
>     start    timestamp    NOT NULL default CURRENT_TIMESTAMP(0),
>     intlen    int4        NOT NULL default 60,
>     d_in    int8        NOT NULL,
>     d_out    int8        NOT NULL,
>
>     constraint "stats_min_pkey" PRIMARY KEY ("ip", "start")
> );
> CREATE INDEX stats_min_start ON stats_min (start);
>
> A typical transaction committed on these tables looks like this:
>
> BEGIN WORK
>     DELETE ...
>     UPDATE/INSERT ...
> COMMIT WORK
>
> Trouble is, as the rows in the tables get deleted/inserted/updated
> (the frequency being a couple thousand rows per minute), the database
> is growing out of proportion in size.  After about a week, I have
> to redump the db by hand so as to get query times back to sensible
> figures.  A transaction that takes ~50 seconds before the redump will
> then complete in under 5 seconds (the corresponding data/base/ dir having
> shrunk from ~2 GB to ~0.6GB).
>
> A nightly VACCUM ANALYZE is no use.
>
> A VACUUM FULL is no use.
>
> A VACUUM FULL followed by REINDEX is no use.

Is the space being taken up by stats_min, this index, some other object?
I'm not 100% sure, but after vacuums maybe
select * from pg_class order by relpages desc limit 10;
will give a good idea.

What does VACUUM FULL VERBOSE stats_min; give you?