Re: Does auto-analyze work on dirty writes? - Mailing list pgsql-performance

From Mark Mielke
Subject Re: Does auto-analyze work on dirty writes?
Date
Msg-id 4D4CACD5.7060104@mark.mielke.cc
Whole thread Raw
In response to Re: [HACKERS] Slow count(*) again...  (Mladen Gogala <mladen.gogala@vmsinfo.com>)
Responses Re: Does auto-analyze work on dirty writes?
List pgsql-performance
On 02/04/2011 10:41 AM, Tom Lane wrote:
> 1. Autovacuum fires when the stats collector's insert/update/delete
> counts have reached appropriate thresholds.  Those counts are
> accumulated from messages sent by backends at transaction commit or
> rollback, so they take no account of what's been done by transactions
> still in progress.
>
> 2. Only live rows are included in the stats computed by ANALYZE.
> (IIRC it uses SnapshotNow to decide whether rows are live.)
>
> Although the stats collector does track an estimate of the number of
> dead rows for the benefit of autovacuum, this isn't used by planning.
> Table bloat is accounted for only in terms of growth of the physical
> size of the table in blocks.

Thanks, Tom.

Does this un-analyzed "bloat" not impact queries? I guess the worst case
here is if autovaccum is disabled for some reason and 99% of the table
is dead rows. If I understand the above correctly, I think analyze might
generate a bad plan under this scenario, thinking that a value is
unique, using the index - but every tuple in the index has the same
value and each has to be looked up in the table to see if it is visible?

Still, I guess the idea here is not to disable autovacuum, making dead
rows insignificant in the grand scheme of things. I haven't specifically
noticed any performance problems here - PostgreSQL is working great for
me as usual. Just curiosity...

Cheers,
mark

--
Mark Mielke<mark@mielke.cc>


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