Cookbook recipe

Track table and index bloat

Applies to PostgreSQL 13–17 Last reviewed May 2026 Grounded in source

What This Is

A production experience capsule based on real incident patterns.

Why It Matters

Builds production judgment under pressure.

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Estimated investigation4 min

Scenario

Storage keeps growing faster than your data. You need a repeatable way to estimate bloat and decide what to repack. Diagnose it Quick dead-tuple ratio per table: SELECT relname, n_dead_tup, n_live_tup, round(100*n_dead_tup/greatest(n_live_tup,1),1) AS dead_pct FROM pg_stat_user_tables…

Investigation Path

Storage keeps growing faster than your data. You need a repeatable way to estimate bloat and decide what to repack.

Diagnose it

Quick dead-tuple ratio per table:

SELECT relname,
  n_dead_tup, n_live_tup,
  round(100*n_dead_tup/greatest(n_live_tup,1),1) AS dead_pct
FROM pg_stat_user_tables
ORDER BY n_dead_tup DESC LIMIT 20;

Why it happens

Updates and deletes leave dead tuples that VACUUM reclaims as reusable space but does not return to the OS. A high dead-tuple ratio or oversized relation vs live rows signals bloat.

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Related & next steps

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Concepts on this page

Autovacuum VACUUM Index Bloat
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