Re: autovacuum causing numerous regression-test failures

Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> Tom Lane wrote:
>> Not a solution for "make installcheck",
>
> Well, for "make installcheck" we don't have any control over whether
> autovacuum has been turned on or off manually anyway. If you are
> concerned about build farm reliability, the build farm scripts can
> surely be made to initialize or start the instance in a particular way.
>
> Another option might be to turn off stats_row_level on the fly.

I'm sure I'm missing some of the subtleties of make installcheck issues,
but autovacuum can be enabled / disabled on the fly just as easily as
stats_row_level, so I don't see the difference?

>>> Or we put manual exceptions for the affected tables into
>>> pg_autovacuum.
>> New feature? Or does that capability exist already?
>
> I haven't ever used the pg_autovacuum table but the documentation
> certainly makes one believe that this is possible.

Right, if it doesn't work, that would certainly be a bug. This feature
was included during the original integration into the backend during the
8.0 dev cycle.

> Let's just consider some of the options a bit more closely, and if they
> don't work, we'll revert it.

Agreed.