HI Nathan
> That approach would begin aggressively scaling the priority of tables
> sooner, but I don't know if that's strictly better. In any case, I'd like
> to avoid making the score calculation too magical.
In fact, with the introduction of the vacuum_max_eager_freeze_failure_rate feature, if a table’s age still exceeds more than 1.x times the autovacuum_freeze_max_age, it suggests that the vacuum freeze process is not functioning properly. Once the age surpasses vacuum_failsafe_age, wraparound issues are likely to occur soon.Taking the average of vacuum_failsafe_age and autovacuum_freeze_max_age is not a complex approach. Under the default configuration, this average already exceeds four times the autovacuum_freeze_max_age. At that stage, a DBA should have already intervened to investigate and resolve why the table age is not decreasing.
Thanks
On Wed, Oct 29, 2025 at 10:24:17AM -0500, Sami Imseih wrote:
> I think we do need some documentation about this behavior, which v6 is
> still missing.
Would you be interested in giving that part a try?
> Another thing I have been contemplating about is the change in prioritization
> and the resulting difference in the order in which tables are vacuumed
> is what it means for workloads in which autovacuum tuning that was
> done with the current assumptions will no longer be beneficial.
>
> Let's imagine staging tables that get created and dropped during
> some batch processing window and they see huge data
> ingestion/changes. The current scan will make these less of a priority
> naturally in relation to other permanent tables, but with the new priority,
> we are making these staging tables more of a priority. Users will now
> need to maybe turn off autovacuum on a per-table level to prevent this
> scenario. That is just one example.
>
> What I am also trying to say is should we provide a way, I hate
> to say a GUC, for users to go back to the old behavior? or am I
> overstating the risk here?
It's probably worth testing out this scenario, but I can't say I'm terribly
worried. Those kinds of tables are already getting chosen by autovacuum
earlier due to reltuples == -1, and this patch will just move them to the
front of the list that autovacuum creates. In any case, I'd really like to
avoid a GUC or fallback switch here.
--
nathan
