Type: real
Default: 0 (0ms)
Min: 0 (0ms)
Max: 100 (100ms)
Unit: milliseconds (ms)
Context: user
Restart: false

The amount of time that the process will sleep when the cost limit has been exceeded. If this value is specified without units, it is taken as milliseconds. The default value is zero, which disables the cost-based vacuum delay feature. Positive values enable cost-based vacuuming.

When using cost-based vacuuming, appropriate values for vacuum_cost_delay are usually quite small, perhaps less than 1 millisecond. While vacuum_cost_delay can be set to fractional-millisecond values, such delays may not be measured accurately on older platforms. On such platforms, increasing VACUUM's throttled resource consumption above what you get at 1ms will require changing the other vacuum cost parameters. You should, nonetheless, keep vacuum_cost_delay as small as your platform will consistently measure; large delays are not helpful.

Recommendations

Most of the time, you will want manual vacuum to execute without vacuum_delay, especially if you're using it as part of ETL. If for some reason you can't use autovacuum on an OLTP database, however, you may want to increase this to 20ms to decrease the impact vacuum has on currently running queries. Will cause vacuum to take up to twice as long to complete.

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