What Is VACUUM?
VACUUM reclaims storage occupied by dead tuples in PostgreSQL. It keeps tables from bloating and improves performance. There’s also VACUUM FULL for more aggressive cleanup.
Why It Matters for PostgreSQL Performance
In PostgreSQL performance work, VACUUM affects throughput, latency, or operational reliability depending on workload and configuration.
Practical Benchmarking Context
When benchmarking with pgbench, track how VACUUM changes behavior across scale factor, client concurrency, and storage conditions.
Use this term together with workload shape, concurrency level, and scale factor when interpreting pgbench outputs. Isolated values can be misleading without full run context.
Example
Tip: Use VACUUM ANALYZE to refresh planner stats.