Re: Overhauling "Routine Vacuuming" docs, particularly its handling of freezing - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

From Peter Geoghegan
Subject Re: Overhauling "Routine Vacuuming" docs, particularly its handling of freezing
Date
Msg-id CAH2-Wz=K7Liwm=T310QJ=xssALbxf2KuGykV2O1NDxRs4y-AmA@mail.gmail.com
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In response to Re: Overhauling "Routine Vacuuming" docs, particularly its handling of freezing  (John Naylor <john.naylor@enterprisedb.com>)
List pgsql-hackers
On Sat, Apr 29, 2023 at 8:54 PM John Naylor
<john.naylor@enterprisedb.com> wrote:
> I've done a more careful read-through, but I'll need a couple more, I imagine.

Yeah, it's tough to get this stuff right.

> I'll first point out some things I appreciate, and I'm glad are taken care of as part of this work:
>
> - Pushing the talk of scheduled manual vacuums to the last, rather than first, para in the intro
> - No longer pretending that turning off autovacuum is somehow normal
> - Removing the egregiously outdated practice of referring to VACUUM FULL as a "variant" of VACUUM
> - Removing the mention of ALTER TABLE that has no earthly business in this chapter -- for that, rewriting the table
isa side effect to try to avoid, not a tool in our smorgasbord for removing severe bloat. 
>
> Some suggestions:
>
> - The section "Recovering Disk Space" now has 5 tips/notes/warnings in a row.

It occurs to me that all of this stuff (TRUNCATE, VACUUM FULL, and so
on) isn't "routine" at all. And so maybe this is the wrong chapter for
this entirely. The way I dealt with it in v2 wasn't very worked out --
I just knew that I had to do something, but hadn't given much thought
to what actually made sense.

I wonder if it would make sense to move all of that stuff into its own
new sect1 of "Chapter 29. Monitoring Disk Usage" -- something along
the lines of "what to do about bloat when all else fails, when the
problem gets completely out of hand". Naturally we'd link to this new
section from "Routine Vacuuming". What do you think of that general
approach?

> This is good information, but I wonder about:
> (Various points)

That's good feedback. I'll get to this in a couple of days.

--
Peter Geoghegan



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