Re: VACUUM Question

On Fri, Jun 04, 2004 at 03:40:45PM -0400, Bill Moran wrote:
> Rick Gigger <rick@alpinenetworking.com> wrote:
>
> > Does VACUUM FULL just lock entire tables and thus cause you to
> > essentially have downtime on that database because it doesn't respond
> > quickly or do you actually have to shut down postgres to safely do a
> > vacuum full?
>
> The former.  You don't shut the database server down, but it won't be
> responsive while vacuum full is running.

But only for the table that's currently being vacuumed: there's only one
table locked at any time.

(A different issue is the IO storm caused by the vacuum, which makes
everything else slower.)

--
Alvaro Herrera (<alvherre[a]dcc.uchile.cl>)
"En las profundidades de nuestro inconsciente hay una obsesiva necesidad
de un universo lógico y coherente. Pero el universo real se halla siempre
un paso más allá de la lógica" (Irulan)