Re: Autovacuum Improvements (was: Second attempt,

Yes, I think there are these TODO items. I was waiting to see what
additional replies there are before adding them.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Matthew O'Connor wrote:
> Alvaro Herrera wrote:
> > Csaba Nagy wrote:
> >>> Alternatively, perhaps a threshold so that a table is only considered
> >>> for vacuum if:
> >>> (table-size * overall-activity-in-last-hour) < threshold
> >>> Ideally you'd define your units appropriately so that you could just
> >>> define threshold in postgresql.conf as 30% (of peak activity in last 100
> >>> hours say).
> >> No, this is definitely not enough. The problem scenario is when
> >> autovacuum starts vacuuming a huge table and that keeps it busy 10 hours
> >> and in the meantime the small but frequently updated tables get awfully
> >> bloated...
> >>
> >> The only solution to that is to have multiple vacuums running in
> >> parallel, and it would be really nice if those multiple vacuums would be
> >> coordinated by autovacuum too...
> >
> > Yes, I agree, having multiple "autovacuum workers" would be useful.
>
> Bruce, I think there are a couple of items here that might be worth
> adding to the TODO list.
>
> 1) Allow multiple "autovacuum workers": Currently Autovacuum is only
> capable of ordering one vacuum command at a time, for most work loads
> this is sufficient but falls down when a hot (very actively updated
> table) goes unvacuumed for a long period of time because a large table
> is currently being worked on.
>
> 2) Once we can have multiple autovacuum workers: Create the concept of
> hot tables that require more attention and should never be ignored for
> more that X minutes, perhaps have one "autovacuum worker" per hot table?
> (What do people think of this?)
>
> 3) Create "Maintenance Windows" for autovacuum: Currently autovacuum
> makes all of it's decisions based on a single per-table threshold value,
> maintenance windows would allow the setting of a per-window, per-table
> threshold. This makes it possible to, for example, forbid (or strongly
> discourage) autovacuum from doing maintenance work during normal
> business hours either for the entire system or for specific tables.
>
> None of those three items are on the todo list, however I think there is
> general consensus that they (at least 1 & 3) are good ideas.
>
>
> ---------------------------(end of broadcast)---------------------------
> TIP 4: Have you searched our list archives?
>
> http://archives.postgresql.org/

--
Bruce Momjian bruce(at)momjian(dot)us
EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com

+ If your life is a hard drive, Christ can be your backup. +