Citus Blog

If you've been running PostgreSQL for a while, you've heard about autovacuum. Yes, autovacuum, the thing which everybody asks you not to turn off, which is supposed to keep your database clean and reduce bloat automatically.

And yet—imagine this: one fine day, you see that your database size is larger than you expect, the I/O load on your database has increased, and things have slowed down without much change in workload. You begin looking into what might have happened. You run the excellent Postgres bloat query and you notice you have a lot of bloat. So you run the VACUUM command manually to clear the bloat in your Postgres database. Good!

But then you have to address the elephant in the room: why didn't Postgres autovacuum clean up the bloat in the first place...? Does the above story sound familiar? Well, you are not alone. 😊

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