Hackers,
Here is a first cut at autovacuum integration. Please have a look at
it. Note that this patch automatically creates three new files:
src/backend/postmaster/autovacuum.c
src/include/catalog/pg_autovacuum.h
src/include/postmaster/autovacuum.h
Note that the daemon is not activated by default.
There are several things that are painfully evident with this thing on:
- TRUNCATE does not update stats. It should send a stat message to
which we can react.
- If you empty a whole table using DELETE just after an
automatically-issued VACUUM takes place, the new threshold may not be
enough to trigger a new VACUUM. Thus you end up with a bloated table,
and it won't get vacuumed until it grows again. This may be a problem
with the cost equations, but those are AFAICT identical to those of
pg_autovacuum, so we may need to rethink the equations.
- The default value of on for reset stats on server start is going to be
painful with autovacuum, because it reacts badly to losing the info.
- We should make VACUUM and ANALYZE update the pg_autovacuum relation,
in order to make the autovacuum daemon behave sanely with manually
issued VACUUM/ANALYZE.
- Having an autovacuum process running on a database can be surprising
if you want to drop a database, or create a new one using it as a
template. This happenned to me several times.
- The shutdown sequence is not debugged nor very well tested. It may be
all wrong.
- The startup sequence is a mixture from pgarch, normal backend and
pgstat. I find it relatively clean but I can't swear it's bug-free.
- There are no docs
- There are no ALTER TABLE commands to change the pg_autovacuum
attributes for a table. (Enable/disable, set thresholds and scaling
factor)
- I compiled with -DEXEC_BACKEND, but I didn't look to see if it
actually worked on that case.
Apart from all these issues, it is completely functional :-) It can
survive several "make installcheck" runs without problem, and the
regression database is vacuumed/analyzed as it runs.
Some of these issues are trivial to handle. However I'd like to release
this right now, so I can go back to "shared dependencies" now that role
support is in.
Barring any objections I think this should be integrated, so these
issues can be tackled by interested parties.
--
Alvaro Herrera (<alvherre[a]surnet.cl>)
"World domination is proceeding according to plan" (Andrew Morton)
