Postgresql – Does amazon rds PostgreSQL require vacuum

1) If you don't count your own time as a resource, then you should always be able to hand-craft a vacuum schedule which uses fewer total resources than autovacuum does. If you do count your own time, this is almost surely not worthwhile.

2) Other than manually or algorithmically turning it on or off, no. Nor would it make sense to do that. A database that sees only a very steady predictable load with no unusual spikes still needs vacuuming. However, if you do spend a lot of time coming up with a highly optimized hand-crafted vacuum schedule, then autovacuum will never have any vacuuming to do except under unusual activity not anticipated in your custom schedule; so in this sense what you want is automatically the case.

3) It isn't clear whether you mean when an autovacuum worker will start up in a given database, or when any given table will start to be vacuumed. The first is determined by autovacuum_naptime, unless autovacuum_max_workers becomes the limiting factor. The second is determined by when the table crosses the threshold, with a granularity of autovacuum_naptime, except when autovacuum_max_workers becomes the limiting factor. How accurately you can predict this depends on how steady the activity on that table is, and whether the vacuum tasks are generally overloaded or are mostly idle.

Amazon's RDS only offers PostgreSQL versions 9.3.x, and it seems unlikely that they'll ever offer to host older versions of Postgres. So by jumping from a local 8.4 install directly to RDS, you would in effect be making two significant changes at once (jumping up several Postgres versions, as well as switching to managed hosting). That may be alright or not -- it all depends on what features you're using and depending on.

You should do some reading on RDS's limitations (no external hot standby, limited extensions, no shell access to the database instance, etc.) and benefits (hopefully much less maintenance work) and decide whether it's right for you. Also, I suggest you walk through the steps of dumping and restoring your data into RDS and ensure your application works OK, as well as reading through the Postgres major-version release notes for 9.0, 9.1, 9.2, and 9.3, paying particular note to the incompatibilities listed to see if any of them would affect you.