07. Autovacuum and estimated bloat
Monitor autovacuum effectiveness and track bloat accumulation across your database.
note
This dashboard is currently under development. In the live demo, it shows limited data. The underlying metrics are being collected as part of health check data, and the dashboard will be expanded in a future release.
When to use
- Checkup reports autovacuum settings need attention (F001)
- You suspect autovacuum is not keeping up with dead tuple generation
- Investigating why a table keeps growing despite stable row counts
- Tuning autovacuum settings for high-write tables
Key panels (current and planned)
- Vacuum timeline — when vacuums ran and on which tables
- Dead tuple accumulation — rate of dead tuple generation vs cleanup (planned)
- Autovacuum worker utilization — how many workers are active vs available (planned)
- Bloat estimates — per-table and per-index bloat percentages (planned)
What good looks like
- Autovacuum runs regularly on large, frequently-updated tables
- Dead tuple ratio stays low (< 10% of live tuples for most tables)
- Autovacuum workers are not saturated
- Bloat percentages are within acceptable ranges (varies by table size)
What to investigate
| Signal | Next step |
|---|---|
| Dead tuples accumulating | Check if autovacuum is running; look for long-running transactions holding back cleanup |
| Autovacuum workers maxed out | Increase autovacuum_max_workers or tune per-table settings |
| High bloat on specific table | Go to Single table analysis for detailed view |
| Vacuum never runs on a table | Check if autovacuum_enabled is set to off for that table |
Related Checkup checks
- F001 — autovacuum current settings (CLI)
- A007 — altered settings (CLI)
- F004 — heap bloat estimated (monitoring stack)
- F005 — index bloat estimated (monitoring stack)