> Keeping only line pointers itself is not a problem, but it might lead > bloating of line pointers. If a particular tuple in a page is replaced > repeatedly, the line pointers area bloats up to 1/4 of the page.
Where does the 1/4 figure come from?
> We need to work around the problem.
If a row is updated many times until vacuum comes along, what currently happens is that we end up with a bunch of pages full of dead tuples. With the truncation scheme, we could fit way more dead tuples on each page, reducing the need to vacuum. If a row is for example 40 bytes long, including header (a quite narrow one), you could fit 10 line pointers to the space of one row, which means that you could ideally multiply your vacuum interval by a factor of 10x. That's a huge benefit, though indexes would still bloat unless selects marking index pointers as dead keep the bloat in control.
The problem is that if a tuple is updated say hundreds of times before vacuum, but then it's not updated anymore, you'll have a page full of useless line pointers that are not reclaimed. Clearly we should start reclaiming line pointers, but we can only do that for unused line pointers after the last used one.
I thought that we can not reclaim the line pointers unless we remove the corresponding index entries as well. Isn't that the case ? If so, how would we reclaim the line pointers after the last used one ?
