Re: Visibility map and freezing - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

From ITAGAKI Takahiro
Subject Re: Visibility map and freezing
Date
Msg-id 20090119100127.87B2.52131E4D@oss.ntt.co.jp
Whole thread Raw
In response to Re: Visibility map and freezing  (Gregory Stark <stark@enterprisedb.com>)
Responses Re: Visibility map and freezing  (Heikki Linnakangas <heikki.linnakangas@enterprisedb.com>)
List pgsql-hackers
Gregory Stark <stark@enterprisedb.com> wrote:

> >> I don't think we can perfectly capture the meaning of these GUCs in the
> >> name. I think our goal should be to avoid confusion between them.
> 
> I was thinking it would be clearer if the options which control *when*
> autovacuum fires off a worker consistently had some action word in them like
> "trigger" or "start" or "launch".

I think we need more explanations about those variables,
not only "how to work" but also "how to tune" them.
I feel they are un-tunable parameters.

Our documentation says:
| Larger values of these settings
| preserve transactional information longer, while smaller values increase
| the number of transactions that can elapse before the table must be
| vacuumed again.
i.e, we are explaining the variables only as "Larger is better",
but is it really true?

I think we should have answers about the following questions:

- What relation are there between autovacuum_freeze_max_age, vacuum_freeze_min_age and vacuum_freeze_table_age? If we
increaseone of them, should we also increase the others?
 

- Is it ok to increase the variables to maximum values? Are there any trade-off?

- Are there some conditions where whole-table-scanning vacuum is more effective than vacuums using visibility map? If
so,we should switch to full-scan *automatically*, without relying on user configurations.
 

Regards,
---
ITAGAKI Takahiro
NTT Open Source Software Center




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