At 03:00 06/04/29, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
>On Fri, Apr 28, 2006 at 17:37:30 +0000,
> Bealach-na Bo <bealach_na_bo@hotmail.com> wrote:
> > >The above shows that the indexes contained 10M rows and 160M of dead
> > >space each. That means you weren't vacuuming nearly enough.
> >
> > How is it that a row in the table can grow to a size far exceeding the sum
> > of the maximum sized of the fields it consists of?
>
>Because unless you run vacuum, the old deleted rows are not reused. Those
>rows cannot be deleted immediately, because the rows may be visible to
>other transactions. Periodic vacuums are used to find deleted rows which
>are no longer visible to any transactions.
>
>You probably want to read the following:
>http://developer.postgresql.org/docs/postgres/routine-vacuuming.html
Would recycling dead tuples on the fly (mentioned in p.14 in the article
http://www.postgresql.org/files/developer/transactions.pdf ) significantly
reduce the need for periodic vacuums?
Without knowing the internals, I have this simplistic idea: if Postgres
maintains the current lowest transaction ID for all active transactions, it
probably could recycle dead tuples on the fly. The current lowest
transaction ID could be maintained in a doubly linked list with maximum
<max_connections> entries. A backward link in the tuple header might be
needed too.
Any comments?
Cheers,
KC.
