We need some advice on how to handle some large table autovacuum issues. One of our 8.1.2 autovacuums is launching a DB-wide vacuum on our 270GB database to prevent xid wrap-around, but is getting hung-up and/or bogged down for hours on a 40gb table and taking the server performance down with it, apparently due to an IO bottleneck. The autovac child process becomes completely unresponsive to SIGTERM/SIGINT; only a sigkill restart with disabling the autovac daemon gets us back to adequate performance for now.
We are discussing how to partition the table (difficult due to existing foreign keys in other tables), and archiving/clearing data. Are there any other tricks to get it past this large table for the time being and still get the xid wraparound fix? TIA. Ed ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 2: Don't 'kill -9' the postmaster
