I can see that. I've really only worked with a few workloads where this behavior was quite bad. (In particular, the out-of-the-box policy to vacuum when the dead tuple fraction reaches 20% means that for an INSERT-mostly workload with a bit of UPDATE/DELETE, the vacuums get further and further apart and take longer and longer.) In the worst one I've worked on, the effects take several days or weeks to show up, but they degrade system throughput by 50-80% (!) for days or weeks on end.
The experience makes me wonder if the database is designed primarily using short-term, modest-scale workloads (which are much easier to test) and not behavior that only shows up after several weeks of a continuous, heavy workload. It obviously works for a lot of users.
The experience makes me wonder if the database is designed primarily using short-term, modest-scale workloads (which are much easier to test) and not behavior that only shows up after several weeks of a continuous, heavy workload. It obviously works for a lot of users.