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I've got a task to work with a 9.6 Postgres DB, and for some reason Autovacuum is disabled.

The database was extremely slow, and after a manual VACUUM it could breathe again.

The point is, why disable Autovaccum? Is there any practical scenario for a small database to have Autovaccum disabled?

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    There is absolutely no reason to disable it. Whoever did that, did no have a clue on how to properly manage a Postgres database
    – user1822
    Aug 8, 2019 at 15:01
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    @a_horse_with_no_name what if you have a db with high load half of the day and almost no use the other half? Wouldn't it be a good idea disable autovacuum and schedule a manual vacuum?
    – EAmez
    Aug 9, 2019 at 7:08

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There is no good reason to keep autovacuum disabled in a production database, and you will run into problems if you do that.

It may make sense to disable autovacuum during exceptional operations, where you run a manual vacuum anyway and don't want your performance sapped by a background job, but more often than not such trickery is a premature optimization.

I would run VACUUM (FULL) on the database, followed by VACUUM (ANALYZE). That shoud take care of any damage done.

Then enable autovacuum.

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