Re: Autovacuum-induced regression test instability

On Mon, Apr 15, 2019 at 01:22:30PM -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> In connection with the issue discussed at [1], I tried to run
> the core regression tests with extremely aggressive autovacuuming
> (I set autovacuum_naptime = 1s, autovacuum_vacuum_threshold = 5,
> autovacuum_vacuum_cost_delay = 0). I found that the timestamp
> test tends to fail with diffs caused by unstable row order in
> timestamp_tbl. This is evidently because it does a couple of
> DELETEs before inserting the table's final contents; if autovac
> comes along at the right time then some of those slots can get
> recycled in between insertions. I'm thinking of committing the
> attached patch to prevent this, since in principle such failures
> could occur even without hacking the autovac settings. Thoughts?

Aren't extra ORDER BY clauses the usual response to tuple ordering? I
really think that we should be more aggressive with that. For table
AM, it can prove to be very useful to run the main regression test
suite with default_table_access_method enforced, and most likely AMs
will not ensure the same tuple ordering as heap.
--
Michael