Re: 8.1.8 autovacuum missing databases

Alvaro Herrera <alvherre(at)alvh(dot)no-ip(dot)org> writes:
> I'm wondering if there could be a hidden bug in the age arithmetic
> somehow -- say because it's using unsigned comparison of signed
> variables, or the Max() macro is flawed, or something weird like that.

Umm ... actually, there's a bug in the hand calculations I did at the
start of this thread. The threshold that 8.1 uses is

(int32) ((MaxTransactionId >> 3) * 3 - 100000)

which works out to 1610512733, which is considerably more than the 300M
or so age() values that Ian is showing. I had somehow convinced myself
that it was less and he should be getting whole-db vacuums, but in
reality he shouldn't yet. It's only in 8.2 and up that we have a much
smaller threshold for trying to advance datfrozenxid.

So actually, what we are looking at is the not-whole-db logic, and
it's working exactly as designed. The only unexpected behavior was
the choice not to vacuum some of the DBs, which we now know is explained
by their having a last_autovac_time in the future.

Perhaps it is worth adding a defense to autovac to not believe last
autovac times that are in the future, since the system clock is not
under our control and could go backwards. Other than that I don't
think there's any bug here.

regards, tom lane