Thread: Suggestions to overcome 'multixact "members" limit exceeded' in temporary tables

I've reached the limit of my understanding and attempts at correcting my code/use of temporary tables in the face of multixact members and have come to ask for your help! Here's a brief description of my software;

Pool of N connection sessions, persistent for the duration of the program lifetime.

Upon each session initialisation, a set of CREATE TEMPORARY TABLE ON COMMIT DELETE ROWS statements are made for bulk ingest.

Each session is acquired by a thread for use when ingesting data and therefore each temporary table remains until the session is terminated

The thread performs a COPY <temp table> FROM STDIN in binary format

Then an INSERT INTO <main table> SELECT FROM <temp table> WHERE...

This has been working great for a while and with excellent throughput. However, upon scaling up I eventually hit this error;

ERROR:  multixact "members" limit exceeded
DETAIL:  This command would create a multixact with 2 members, but the remaining space is only enough for 0 members.
HINT:  Execute a database-wide VACUUM in database with OID 16467 with reduced vacuum_multixact_freeze_min_age and vacuum_multixact_freeze_table_age settings.

And it took me quite a while to identify that it appears to be coming from the temporary table (the other 'main' tables were being autovacuumed OK) - which makes sense because they have a long lifetime, aren't auto vacuumed and shared by transactions (in turn).

I first attempted to overcome this by introducing an initial step of always creating the temporary table before the copy (and using on commit drop) but this lead to a terrible performance degradation.

Next, I reverted the above and instead I introduced a VACUUM step every 1000000 (configurable) ingest operations

Finally, I introduced a TRUNCATE step in addition to the occasional VACUUM since the TRUNCATE allowed the COPY option of FREEZE.

The new overhead appears minimal until after several hours and again I've hit a performance degradation seemingly dominated by the TRUNCATE.

My questions are;

1) Is the VACUUM necessary if I use TRUNCATE + COPY FREEZE (on the temporary table)?

2) Is there really any benefit to using FREEZE here or is it best to just VACUUM the temporary tables occasionally?

3) Is there a better way of managing all this!? Perhaps re-CREATING the TT every day or something?

I understand that I can create a Linux tmpfs partition for a tablespace for the temporary tables and that may speed up the TRUNCATE but that seems like a hack and I'd rather not do it at all if it's avoidable.

Thanks for your help,

Jim

PS. PG version in use is 15.4 if that matters here

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Jim Vanns
Principal Production Engineer
Industrial Light & Magic, London