Re: Excessive growth of pg_attribute and other system tables

On Thursday 17 March 2005 3:51 pm, Tom Lane wrote:
> Steve Crawford <scrawford@pinpointresearch.com> writes:
> > My autovacuum config is running and I do see regular periodic
> > vacuums of these pg_ tables but still they grow.
>
> Do you have the FSM settings set large enough to account for all
> the free space?

max_fsm_pages = 20000
max_fsm_relations = 1000

I just poked through the cluster. I have 6 user databases plus
template0 and template1. Total tables in the cluster has reached
slightly over 1,000 user tables plus all the system tables in the 8
databases. Does this indicate that I need to increase
max_fsm_relations to greater than the total number of tables in the
cluster? If so it's not a problem as bumping it to 2000 will only
cost me ~50k of my 4G memory plus a bit more since max_fsm_pages
would have to be increased to at least 32000.

> Also you might want to check for newer versions of autovacuum.  I
> recall that the earlier releases had bugs that sometimes made it
> skip vacuuming tables that should be vacuumed.

pg_autovacuum is from 7.4.6 release and is showing periodic vacuums of
the problem tables. I thought that bug was in some release prior to
7.4.6. Does the bug allow it to show a vacuum taking place but not do
it?

Cheers,
Steve