PostgreSQL 8.x defaults

[Vivek Khera]

On Apr 9, 2007, at 5:46 AM, Palle Girgensohn wrote:

> About the two "strategies" you present; autovacuum will probably  
> need some tweaking for most applications, since it will not perform  
> vacuums unless a certain percentage of the tuples are changed.  
> Hence, usually I use a combination of autovacuum and a nightly  
> vacuumdb -za. For smaller installations, the vanilla setup could of  
> course be either of your suggestions, or my just suggested combo,  
> it is probably a matter of taste. I'd prefer you #1 or the combo...  
> I'll think about it a bit more, and will fix the port. :)

I think the port should not try to meddle with the postgresql.conf  
file *at all* and leave both vacuums off by default.  The package  
installer needs to configure postgres, and part of that is to enable  
proper vacuum maintenance as per site policy.  Having to undo work  
done by the port is not sensible.

In short: leave the default status of the periodic script "off", and  
do not try to enable autovacuum (I suppose if you ask the user at  
package install time, it would be ok to do so.)