Re: Heavy write activity on first vacuum of fresh TOAST data

On Thu, 2007-12-13 at 13:52 -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
> Alvaro Herrera <alvherre(at)alvh(dot)no-ip(dot)org> writes:
> > Simon Riggs wrote:
> >> We might be able to have bgwriter set hint bits on dirty blocks,
>
> > I don't think that works, because the bgwriter has no access to the
> > catalogs, therefore it cannot examine the page contents. To bgwriter,
> > pages are opaque.
>
> Another issue is that this'd require bgwriter to access the clog SLRU
> area. I seem to remember worrying that that could lead to low-level
> deadlocks, though I cannot recall the exact case at the moment.
> Even without that, it would increase contention for SLRU, which we
> probably don't want.

I was trying to highlight the problems, not advocate that as an
approach, sorry if I wasn't clear enough. Even if you solved the
problems both of you have mentioned I don't think the dynamic behaviour
will be useful enough to merit the effort of trying. I'm definitely not
going to be spending any time on this. Fish are frying elsewhere.

--
Simon Riggs
2ndQuadrant http://www.2ndQuadrant.com