Re: [HACKERS] Block level parallel vacuum

On Tue, Oct 15, 2019 at 10:34 AM Masahiko Sawada <sawada(dot)mshk(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Oct 14, 2019 at 6:37 PM Amit Kapila <amit(dot)kapila16(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> >
>
> > 3. Do we really need to give the responsibility of deleting empty
> > pages (gistvacuum_delete_empty_pages) to gistvacuumcleanup. Can't we
> > do it in gistbulkdelte? I see one advantage of postponing it till the
> > cleanup phase which is if somehow we can accumulate stats over
> > multiple calls of gistbulkdelete, but I am not sure if it is feasible.
> > At least, the way current code works, it seems that there is no
> > advantage to postpone deleting empty pages till the cleanup phase.
> >
>
> Considering the current strategy of page deletion of gist index the
> advantage of postponing the page deletion till the cleanup phase is
> that we can do the bulk deletion in cleanup phase which is called at
> most once. But I wonder if we can do the page deletion in the similar
> way to btree index.
>

I think there might be some advantage of the current strategy due to
which it has been chosen. I was going through the development thread
and noticed some old email which points something related to this.
See [1].

> Or even we use the current strategy I think we can
> do that while not passing the pages information from bulkdelete to
> vacuumcleanup using by GistBulkDeleteResult.
>

Yeah, I also think so. I have started a new thread [2] to know the
opinion of others on this matter.

> > If we avoid postponing deleting empty pages till the cleanup phase,
> > then we don't have the problem for gist indexes.
>
> Yes. But considering your pointing out I guess that there might be
> other index AMs use the stats returned from bulkdelete in the similar
> way to gist index (i.e. using more larger structure of which
> IndexBulkDeleteResult is just the first field). If we have the same
> concern the parallel vacuum still needs to deal with that as you
> mentioned.
>

Right, apart from some functions for memory allocation/estimation and
stats copy, we might need something like amcanparallelvacuum, so that
index methods can have the option to not participate in parallel
vacuum due to reasons similar to gist or something else. I think we
can work towards this direction as this anyway seems to be required
and till we reach any conclusion for gist indexes, you can mark
amcanparallelvacuum for gist indexes as false.

[1] - https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/8548498B-6EC6-4C89-8313-107BEC437489%40yandex-team.ru
[2] - https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/CAA4eK1LGr%2BMN0xHZpJ2dfS8QNQ1a_aROKowZB%2BMPNep8FVtwAA%40mail.gmail.com

--
With Regards,
Amit Kapila.
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com