Re: Some thoughts about i/o priorities and throttling vacuum - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

From Shridhar Daithankar
Subject Re: Some thoughts about i/o priorities and throttling vacuum
Date
Msg-id 3F8FEFF5.4020208@persistent.co.in
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In response to Re: Some thoughts about i/o priorities and throttling vacuum  (Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>)
Responses Re: Some thoughts about i/o priorities and throttling vacuum  (Andrew Sullivan <andrew@libertyrms.info>)
Re: Some thoughts about i/o priorities and throttling vacuum  (Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@dcc.uchile.cl>)
Re: Some thoughts about i/o priorities and throttling vacuum  ("Matthew T. O'Connor" <matthew@zeut.net>)
List pgsql-hackers
Tom Lane wrote:
> I was just thinking of a GUC parameter: wait N milliseconds between
> pages, where N defaults to zero probably.  A user who wants to run his
> vacuum as a background process could set N larger than zero.  I don't
> believe we are anywhere near being able to automatically adjust the
> delay based on load, and even if we could, this would ignore the point
> you make above --- the user's intent has to matter as much as anything
> else.

I am slightly confused here. IIRC pg_autovacuum never did a vacuum full. At the 
most it does vacuum /vacuum analyse, none of which chew disk bandwidth. And if 
pg_autovacuum is running along with postmaster all the time, with aggressive 
polling like 5 sec, the database should not accumulate any dead tuples nor it 
would suffer xid wraparound as there are vacuum happening constantly.

What's left in above scenario? As long as all the requirements for pg_autovacuum 
are met, namely setting it up, setting it up aggressively and tuning 
postgresql.conf correctly, vacuum and related problems should be a thing in 
past, at least as far as 7.4 and onwards is considered.

Of course RSM implementation for vacuum would still be much needed but right 
now, it does not affect disk IO directly(except for tossing buffer cache out of 
track that is).

What am I missing?
 Shridhar



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