Re: problems with new vacuum (??)

Tom Lane wrote:
>
> 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.

They drive each other to the ground too ;(

When I tried to run the new vacuum concurrently with a pgbench in hope
to make it perform better for large number of updates (via removing the
need to scan large number of dead tuples) 1 concurrent vacuum was able
to
make 128 pgbench backends more than twice as slow as they were without
vacuum.
And this is an extra slowdown from another 2-3X slowdown due to dead
tuples
(got from comparing speed on VACUUM FULL db and db aftre doing ~10k
pgbench transactions)

> 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.

Have you any ideas how to distinguish between interactive and
non-interactive
disk I/O coming from postgresql backends ?

Can I for example nice the vacuum'ing backend without getting the
"reverse priority" effects ?

> > 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
>
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