Re: Bloated pg_shdepend_depender_index

In vacuum full output, indexes are listed as having been vacuumed along with
their table.
Have I misinterpreted this message saying that vacuum is incapable of
vacuuming indexes (and reindex is the only option to do so) please?

On 3/25/06, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
>
> Peter Eisentraut <peter_e(at)gmx(dot)net> writes:
> > Am Freitag, 24. März 2006 05:48 schrieb Tom Lane:
> >> Well, the VACUUM FULL algorithm is incapable of shrinking indexes ---
> >> the only way is REINDEX, or something else that reconstructs indexes
> >> from scratch, such as CLUSTER. One of the things we need to look into
> >> is putting more smarts into VACUUM so that it automatically does
> >> something reasonable when faced with extreme cases like these.
>
> > If the user is running VACUUM FULL, he has presumably determined that
> the
> > table is too bloated to be recovered in a graceful way, and quite likely
> the
> > indexes are going to be bloated similarly. So seemingly one might as
> well
> > launch a reindexing on the table after VACUUM FULL has done its thing.
> > Whether that should be automatic is another question but perhaps the
> advice
> > should be documented somewhere?
>
> Actually, I wonder whether VACUUM FULL shouldn't be thrown away and
> replaced by something else entirely. That algorithm only really works
> nicely when just a small percentage of the rows need to be moved to
> re-compact the table --- if you're moving lots of rows, it makes the
> index bloat situation *worse* not better because of the transient need
> for index entries pointing to both copies of moved rows. Lazy VACUUM
> has become the de-facto standard for situations where there's not a huge
> amount of empty space, and so it's not clear where the sweet spot is for
> VACUUM FULL anymore. If you've got enough disk space, a rewrite (like
> CLUSTER or ALTER TABLE) is going to blow the doors off VACUUM FULL,
> let alone VACUUM FULL plus REINDEX. Not to mention that for
> sufficiently huge tables, VACUUM FULL fails outright because it runs out
> of RAM.
>
> We need to fix CLUSTER to make it MVCC-safe (ie, not discard
> recently-dead rows), and it'd be nice to have something like it that
> didn't worry about ordering but just did a seqscan of the source table.
> Then I'd be inclined to recommend that instead of VACUUM FULL for most
> cases of severe bloat.
>
> Unfortunately this all breaks down for shared system catalogs and the
> core (nailed-in) catalogs, because we can't change their relfilenodes
> and so the crash-safe CLUSTER/REINDEX approach doesn't work. We still
> need a new idea or two there.
>
> regards, tom lane
>
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