Optimizing autovacuum: PostgreSQL’s vacuum cleaner | Citus Con: An Event for Postgres 2022

Video of a conference talk by Samay Sharma at Citus Con: An Event for Postgres. Abstract: If you have run PostgreSQL for any serious OLTP workload, you have heard of autovacuum. Autovacuum is PostgreSQL’s way of running vacuum regularly to clear bloat from your database tables and indexes. However, in spite of having autovacuum on, a large number of PostgreSQL users still see their database bloat increasing. What’s going on?

In the last decade, I have personally worked with 50+ Postgres customers who have struggled to figure out why autovacuum isn’t working how they expect. In this talk, we will walk through what I’ve learned from analyzing and improving vacuum with these production Postgres databases. In this talk you will learn how autovacuum works, how to figure out why it is not working as you expect, and what you can do to fix it.

Samay is a principal engineering manager in the PostgreSQL database engineering team at Microsoft. He has been working with PostgreSQL for almost a decade—at Microsoft and at Citus Data prior to that—as an extension developer, solutions engineer, and an ardent fan of PostgreSQL. Samay has a keen interest in making it easier for users to understand PostgreSQL performance.

► Video bookmarks:
⏩ 00:00 Introduction
⏩ 01:26 Why vacuum is essential
⏩ 02:51 When vacuuming manually works best
⏩ 03:58 Autovacuum overview
⏩ 05:37 Autovacuum is not magic
⏩ 28:04 5 things to remember

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