How can one tell if the autovacuum daemon in Postgres 9.x is running and maintaining the database cluster?
The AUTOVACUUM daemon is enabled in the default configuration. The AUTOVACUUM daemon is made up of multiple processes that reclaim storage by removing obsolete data or tuples from the database.
For every database in a cluster autovacuum attempts to start a new worker once every autovacuum_naptime (default 1 minute). It will run at most autovacuum_max_workers (default 3) at a time.
Autovacuum does take a lock on the table, but it is a weak lock which does not interfere with normal operations (SELECT, UPDATE, DELETE) but will interfere with things like adding indexes, or truncating the table.
PostgreSQL has an optional but highly recommended feature called autovacuum, whose purpose is to automate the execution of VACUUM and ANALYZE commands. When enabled, autovacuum checks for tables that have had a large number of inserted, updated or deleted tuples.
This is specific to Postgres 9.3 on UNIX. For Windows, see this question.
SELECT schemaname, relname, last_vacuum, last_autovacuum, vacuum_count, autovacuum_count -- not available on 9.0 and earlier FROM pg_stat_user_tables;
$ ps -axww | grep autovacuum 24352 ?? Ss 1:05.33 postgres: autovacuum launcher process (postgres)
# grep autovacuum /var/log/postgresql LOG: autovacuum launcher started LOG: autovacuum launcher shutting down
If you want to know more about the autovacuum activity, set log_min_messages
to DEBUG1..DEBUG5
. The SQL command VACUUM VERBOSE
will output information at log level INFO
.
Regarding the Autovacuum Daemon, the Posgres docs state:
In the default configuration, autovacuuming is enabled and the related configuration parameters are appropriately set.
See Also:
I'm using:
select count(*) from pg_stat_activity where query like 'autovacuum:%';
in collectd to know how many autovacuum are running concurrently.
You may need to create a security function like this:
CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION public.pg_autovacuum_count() RETURNS bigint AS 'select count(*) from pg_stat_activity where query like ''autovacuum:%'';' LANGUAGE SQL STABLE SECURITY DEFINER;
and call that from collectd.
In earlier Postgres, "query" was "current_query" so change it according to what works.
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