Re: vacuum locking

On Thu, 30 Oct 2003, Rob Nagler wrote:

> The vacuum problem is very serious for the problematic database to the
> point that one of my customer's customers said:
> 
>     However, I am having a hard time understanding why the system is so
>     slow... from my perspective it seems like you have some fundamental
>     database issues that need to be addressed.
> 
> This is simply unacceptable, and that's why we're moving to Oracle.
> It's very bad for my business reputation.
> 
> I don't have a ready solution to vacuuming, and none on the list have
> been effective.  We'll be adding more memory, but it seems to be disk
> bandwidth problem.  I run Oracle on much slower system, and I've never
> noticed problems of this kind, even when a database-wide validation is
> running.  When vacuum is running, it's going through the entire
> database, and that pretty much trashes all other queries, especially
> DSS queries.  As always it is just software, and there's got to be
> 80/20 solution.

Have you looked at the autovacuum daemon?  Was it found wanting or what?  
I've had good luck with it so far, so I was just wondering if it might 
work for your needs as well.  It's quite intelligent about which tables 
et.al. it vacuums.