>
>
> Personally I think some log output, done better, would have been more useful for me at the time. At the time I was
tryingto diagnose an ineffective vacuum and postgres' logs weren't giving me any hints about what was wrong. I turned
tothe mailing list and got immediate help, but I felt that ideally postgres would be logging something to tell me that
some1 day old transactions were preventing auto vacuum from doing its job. Something, anything that I could google.
Othernovices in my situation probably wouldn't know to look in the pg_stats* tables, so in retrospect my patch isn't
reallyachieving my original goal.
>
> Should we consider taking a logging approach instead?
Dopey suggestion:
Instead of logging around vacuum and auto_vacuum, perhaps log transactions that are open for longer than some (perhaps
configurable)time? The default might be pretty large, say 6 hours. Are there common use cases for txs that run for
longerthan 6 hours? Seeing a message such as:
WARNING: Transaction <X> has been open more than Y. This tx may be holding locks preventing other txs from operating
andmay prevent vacuum from cleaning up deleted rows.
Would give a pretty clear indication of a problem :)