Disabled autovacuum causes severe bloat and eventual outage risk

When autovacuum is disabled without a replacement cleanup mechanism, dead rows accumulate indefinitely. This causes severe table and index bloat, dramatically degrading query performance and potentially leading to disk space exhaustion or transaction ID wraparound, which can force database shutdown.

Never disable autovacuum unless you have a regularly executed cleanup script (e.g., cron-based VACUUM). If autovacuum is causing performance issues, tune the parameters (scale_factor, cost_limit) rather than disabling it. Re-enable autovacuum immediately if currently disabled and verify it is running successfully.