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I have an autovacuum (to prevent wraparound) happening on one of my tables for almost 4 days. I'm wondering if there is any way for me to tell if it's not keeping up with the amount of updates/deletes that are happening.

For reference, I am using Postgres 9.6 on Google CloudSQL. They have a known issue where pg_stat_progress_vacuum returns null for everything.

I've also been checking pg_stat_all_tables and have noticed that n_dead_tup for my table is going up instead of down, but I'm not sure if this number would be aware of the autovacuuming that is going on.

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Bad luck. If you have a hosted database, and the monitoring view is broken, there's nothing you can do.

To speed up autovacuum as much as possible, increase maintenance_work_mem and lower autovacuum_vacuum_cost_delay. But that won't have an effect on an already running autovacuum worker.

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  • Thanks for your quick reply. Do you know if looking at n_dead_tup in pg_stat_all_tables is a reliable way of telling if the autovacuum won't complete? My value keeps going up, but I'm not sure if it's because it's not aware of the vacuuming taking place.
    – Mr. Snrub
    Jun 10, 2020 at 7:52
  • @Mr.Snrub, check if there any connection status show in idle in transaction if you find any then better to kill them . And also if your tables are larger then consider to decrease autovacuum_vacuum_scale_factor. and the final solution VACCUM FULL or do pg_pack.
    – Rj_N
    Jun 10, 2020 at 8:14
  • @Rj_N Killing sessions that could block autovacuum is alright. Decreasing the scale factor or running VACUUM (FULL) are bad advice and will harm rather than help. Jun 10, 2020 at 8:16
  • @LaurenzAlbe @Rj_N: do either of you know if n_dead_tup in view pg_stat_all_tables is a sign that the vacuum is removing dead rows slower than new ones are being added?
    – Mr. Snrub
    Jun 10, 2020 at 8:38
  • No, n_dead_tup is only updated when VACUUM is done. Jun 10, 2020 at 8:48

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