[baq]

You should run vacuum as often as possible in Postgres if you’re doing anything other than INSERTs, this is a design tradeoff in Postgres itself. It’s the reason autovacuum exists and why tuning it is so important for performance; nothing wrong with doing a VACUUM ANALYZE after finishing a large DML batch job.

[TurdF3rguson]

what does as often as possible mean? It will auto-vacuum when it's idle, right? Why not just let it do that?

[baq]

What do you mean by ‘idle’?

If you mean your database is seeing extended periods of no updates to a table, you still want to vacuum, maybe even vacuum full if you know when traffic stopped and for how long to get the best possible read performance.

If you have quiet periods in both reads and writes, enjoy the luxury of having an unused database to operate.