Re: problems with new vacuum (??)

Barry Lind <barry(at)xythos(dot)com> writes:
> But while this vacuum was running the rest of the system was performing
> very poorly. Opperations that usually are subsecond, where taking
> minutes to complete.

Is this any different from the behavior of 7.1 vacuum? Also, what
platform are you on?

I've noticed on a Linux 2.4 box (RH 7.2, typical commodity-grade PC
hardware) that vacuum, pgbench, or almost any I/O intensive operation
drives interactive performance into the ground. I have not had an
opportunity to try to characterize the problem, but I suspect Linux's
disk I/O scheduler is not bright enough to prioritize interactive
operations.

> 2001-12-31 22:16:40 [20655] DEBUG: recycled transaction log file
> 000000010000009A

> The interesting thing (at least in my mind) is that these messages were
> produced by all of the other postgres processes, not by the vacuum
> process.

No surprise, as they're coming from the checkpoint process(es).

> The second issue I noticed was that the vacuum process later just hung.

You sure you just didn't wait long enough?

There was a deadlock condition found in 7.2b4 recently, but I am not
convinced that it could affect VACUUM. Anyway, if you can replicate
the problem then please attach to the stuck process with gdb and provide
a stack backtrace.

regards, tom lane