There has recently been considerable discussion around auto-tuning.
Throughout the course of this discussion, I raised the idea of
creating a new GUC to separately control autovacuum's usage of
maintenance_work_mem [1], explaining the rationale in some detail [2].
At the time Magnus seemed to think this a good idea [3].
Attached simple patch adds a new GUC, autovacuum_work_mem, which when
set to a value other than -1 (the default) is preferred by autovacuum
over maintenance_work_mem. All other usage of VACUUM is unaffected.
I won't repeat the rationale for the patch here. Appropriate
documentation changes are included. I don't think it's a problem that
autovacuum_work_mem is kind of similar to vacuum_mem in name.
maintenance_work_mem was last spelt vacuum_mem about 10 years ago.
Enough time has passed that I think it very unlikely that someone
might conflate the two.
I have decided to have the default value of -1 carry, and not have it
automatically take the same value as maintenance_work_mem, because
doing so could create the impression that it needs to be set
explicitly, which of course it does not - this is not the same
situation as exists for wal_buffers. We just check if its set when
going to VACUUM, if VACUUM is requested from a worker process.
It seemed neater to me to create a new flag, so that in principle any
vacuum() code path can request autovacuum_work_mem, rather than having
lazyvacuum.c code call IsAutoVacuumWorkerProcess() for the same
purpose. To date, that's only been done within vacuumlazy.c for things
like logging.
[1] http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/CAM3SWZTr1uu+7KR1ZOuGwcJriw9NVBQdjqyDMRWypEvDFi4a6Q@mail.gmail.com
[2] http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/CAM3SWZTYoD0YCLA-4nRb4S8-UGJyr514aEy+8O6VJQwvbzszGQ@mail.gmail.com
[3] http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/CABUevEzVrd36yeFzYBzad0=r09eqRqNoMwX8r=URikG9DrfUkw@mail.gmail.com
--
Peter Geoghegan
