Common vacuum and autovacuum problems

In many of the situations where VACUUM and related cleanup such as VACUUM FULL or CLUSTER need to happen, such as index bloat and excessive dead tuples taking up disk space, the work involved can be so intensive that administrators decide VACUUM is something to be avoided. This is actually the opposite of what should be concluded. In reality, the answer to most vacuum-related problems is to vacuum more often. This reduces the amount of work done by each individual vacuum, and it promotes earlier re-use of space that keeps table sizes from getting so big in the first place. Do not reach the wrong conclusions from a painful vacuum situation—that almost always means you didn't vacuum often enough, not that you should avoid running vacuum as much as possible in the future.

There are however a few known issues that you can run into with vacuum and autovacuum that will inhibit attempts to follow recommended vacuum practice, or otherwise seem...