Re: Autovacuum versus rolled-back transactions

Tom Lane wrote:
> This means that a table could easily be full of dead tuples from failed
> transactions, and yet autovacuum won't do a thing because it doesn't
> know there are any. Perhaps this explains some of the reports we've
> heard of tables bloating despite having autovac on.

I think this is only a problem for failed inserts as failed updates will
be accounted for correctly by autovac and as you said, failed deletes
really do nothing. So is there a way for rollback to just add the
number of rolled back inserts to the n_tup_del counter? Then we would
be ok, no?

> I think it's fairly obvious how n_live_tup and n_dead_tup ought to
> change in response to a failed xact, but maybe not so obvious for the
> other counters. I suggest that the scan/fetch counters (seq_scan,
> seq_tup_read, idx_scan, idx_tup_fetch) as well as all the block I/O
> counters should increment the same for committed and failed xacts,
> since they are meant to count work done regardless of whether the work
> was in vain. I am much less sure how we want n_tup_ins, n_tup_upd,
> n_tup_del to act though. Should they be advanced "as normal" by a
> failed xact? That's what the code is doing now, and if you think they
> are counters for work done, it's not so unreasonable.

I think autovac only considers n_tup_(upd|ins|del) so while it might be
correct to fix those other counters, I don't know that they are must fix
items.