We do provide PostgreSQL support/DBA for a lot of customers, and while I don't have any detailed stats I probably can make some general conclusions ... I'd say

We do provide PostgreSQL support/DBA for a lot of customers, and while I don't have any detailed stats I probably can make some general conclusions ... I'd say that for most deployments bloat it's not a big issue. But of course, once in a while a customer gets bitten by it and we have to intervene. There's a variety of reasons for that: 1. disabled autovacuum Hey, we've disabled autovacuum because we can't risk it affecting production! Hey, we do know our workload patterns much better! Hey! 2. default autovacuum configuration (or bad tuning) The defaults are very conservative, and generally require tuning (cranking up) on large databases. But people tend to do exactly the opposite, driven by the misconception that it will make autovacuum less intrusive. 3. doing things that are known to break things Like, keeping transactions open for a long time. 4. pathological workload patterns There are a few workload patterns that result in bloat (particularly in indexes), and autovacuum can't really fix that. For example large bulk deletes may cause this. This is probably the one thing that can't be fixed by configuration changes, etc.