Re: 3-days-long vacuum of 20GB table

On Fri, Apr 18, 2008 at 10:32 AM, Jeffrey Baker <jwbaker@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Fri, Apr 18, 2008 at 10:03 AM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
>  > "Jeffrey Baker" <jwbaker@gmail.com> writes:
>  >  > This autovacuum has been hammering my server with purely random i/o
>  >  > for half a week.  The table is only 20GB and the i/o subsystem is good
>  >  > for 250MB/s sequential and a solid 5kiops.  When should I expect it to
>  >  > end (if ever)?
>  >
>  >  What have you got maintenance_work_mem set to?  Which PG version
>  >  exactly?
>
>  This is 8.1.9 on Linux x86_64,
>
>  # show maintenance_work_mem ;
>   maintenance_work_mem
>  ----------------------
>   16384

That appears to be the default.  I will try increasing this.  Can I
increase it globally from a single backend, so that all other backends
pick up the change, or do I have to restart the instance?

-jwb