Re: Out of Memory - 8.2.4 - Mailing list pgsql-general

From Alvaro Herrera
Subject Re: Out of Memory - 8.2.4
Date
Msg-id 20070829184944.GP7911@alvh.no-ip.org
Whole thread Raw
In response to Re: Out of Memory - 8.2.4  (Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>)
Responses Re: Out of Memory - 8.2.4  (Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>)
List pgsql-general
Tom Lane escribió:
> Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@commandprompt.com> writes:

> >> Given that the worst-case consequence is extra index vacuum passes,
> >> which don't hurt that much when a table is small, maybe some smaller
> >> estimate like 100 TIDs per page would be enough.  Or, instead of
> >> using a hard-wired constant, look at pg_class.reltuples/relpages
> >> to estimate the average tuple density ...
>
> > This sounds like a reasonable compromise.
>
> Do you want to make it happen?

I'm not having much luck really.  I think the problem is that ANALYZE
stores reltuples as the number of live tuples, so if you delete a big
portion of a big table, then ANALYZE and then VACUUM, there's a huge
misestimation and extra index cleanup passes happen, which is a bad
thing.

There seems to be no way to estimate the dead space, is there?  We could
go to pgstats but that seems backwards.

I was having a problem at first with estimating for small tables which
had no valid info in pg_class.reltuples, but I worked around that by
using MaxHeapTuplesPerPage.  (I was experimenting with the code that
estimates average tuple width in estimate_rel_size() but then figured it
was too much work.)  So this part is fine AFAICS.

I attach the patch I am playing with, and the simple test I've been
examining (on which I comment the ANALYZE on some runs, change the
conditions on the DELETE, put the CREATE INDEX before insertion instead
of after it, etc).

--
Alvaro Herrera                                http://www.CommandPrompt.com/
The PostgreSQL Company - Command Prompt, Inc.

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