In postgre older than 9.0, the VACUUM ANALYZE command needs to be invoked regularly in order to reclaims disk space and make it available for re-use. However, extra space is not returned to the operating system. This can be done only if the VACUUM FULL ANALYZE is used.

Unfortunately VACUUM FULL ANALYZE can not be used when the application is running because postgre needs exclusive write locks for tables in order to do VACUUM FULL ANALYZE.

The NMS gets too slow because of extreme database file growth (from <100MB to 1.6GB in 20 days). Then the application needs to be stopped and VACUUM FULL ANALYZE invoked on database.

Does anyone have some better way to handle this? I will definitely upgrade to postgre 9.1 or 9.2 in about a month, but the upgrade may not necessarily solve this issue.

Kind Regards,
Lukas