AutoVacuum - Tuning and Monitoring

Lloyd Albin
PostgresConf South Africa 2019
postgresconf.o...
I was recently asked by another PostgreSQL DBA about what could be causing queries to run slow while their application is running but then runs fast again after the application is stopped. While I have given several presentations on this subject, each one has been on a specific cause and not talking about all of them together. I decided I would compile them into a single tuning and monitoring presentation.
These slow queries are reported to me by my developers when they start taking minutes to hours to days, in their test and/or production databases. When they stop the application to load up a fresh copy of the database, the same queries run in milliseconds. I have found that this is caused by the AutoVacuum/AutoAnalyze system or lack there of.