Re: The vacuum-ignore-vacuum patch

Alvaro Herrera <alvherre(at)commandprompt(dot)com> writes:
> Tom Lane wrote:
>> nonInVacuumXmin seems useless ... perhaps a vestige of some earlier
>> version of the computation?

> Hmm, not useless at all really -- only a bug of mine. Turns out the
> notInVacuumXmin stuff is essential, so I put it back.

Uh, why?

> I noticed something however -- in calculating the OldestXmin we always
> consider all DBs, even though there is a parameter for skipping backends
> not in the current DB -- this is because the Xmin we store in PGPROC is
> always computed using all backends. The allDbs parameter only allows us
> to skip the Xid of a transaction running elsewhere, but this is not very
> helpful because the Xmin of transactions running in the local DB will
> include those foreign Xids.

Yeah, this has been recognized for some time. However the overhead of
calculating local and global xmins in *every* transaction start is a
significant reason not to do it.

regards, tom lane