Re: Huge memory consumption during vacuum (v.8.0)

Oleg Bartunov <oleg@sai.msu.su> writes:
> On Sun, 30 Jan 2005, Tom Lane wrote:
>> I'm confused.  The log trace you showed us before appeared to be from
>> a non-FULL vacuum, but here you're saying it's VACUUM FULL.  Which is
>> it ... or did you change?

> Yes, first time I tried vacuum from withing psql, next time I decided
> to run vacuumdb and seems changed option.

Um.  Well, a VACUUM FULL is going to build in-memory data structures
that represent *all* of the usable free space in a table.  I don't
actually think that VACUUM FULL is useful on an enormous table ... you
want to keep after it with routine plain VACUUMs, instead.

Another possibility is to use CLUSTER or a rewriting ALTER TABLE to
shrink the space, but be aware that this requires a transient second
copy of the table and indexes.
        regards, tom lane