On Wed, Apr 07, 2004 at 14:55:12 -0400,
Michael Guerin <guerin@rentec.com> wrote:
> My database keeps growing, although the size of the data remains almost
> constant. The database is currently using 140GB, although I estimated
> the actual size to be around 40-50GB. Vacuum's are run twice a day, as
> the superuser, after the large updates and deletes complete. I
> expected the size to level off but it keeps growing, what am I doing
> wrong? For instance one of my tables started with 546,050 pages and
> has grown to 2,290,469 pages although the number of rows are roughly the
> same. Does vacuum free sparse space on a page or just the free space at
> the end? Also, I'm just running vacuum verbose analyze and not running
> vacuum full. Vacuum full does reclaim the space, but it also keeps the
> table locked most of the day.
A plain vacuum only can reclaim space at the end. It is possible that the
combination of how frequently you vacuum and your FSM setting isn't high
enough to cover the amount of deleted tuples you are generating.