RDS

Analyze && Vacuum

RDS has automatic settings for these, they seem to be fine so far. Apparently can be insufficient when the DB gets really big though.

If you need a quick way to check the dead tuple/vacuum/analyze stats, open up a Rails console session through SSH and use

ActiveRecord::Base.connection.exec_query("")

with

SELECT
relname AS TableName
,n_live_tup AS LiveTuples
,n_dead_tup AS DeadTuples
,last_autovacuum AS Autovacuum
,last_autoanalyze AS Autoanalyze
FROM pg_stat_user_tables;

as the passed string.