Re: New strategies for freezing, advancing relfrozenxid early

On Mon, Jan 16, 2023 at 11:31 PM Peter Geoghegan <pg(at)bowt(dot)ie> wrote:
>
> > I think '(nextXID - cutoffs->relfrozenxid) / freeze_table_age' should
> > be the actual fraction right? What is the point of adding 0.5 to the
> > divisor? If there is a logical reason, maybe we can explain in the
> > comments.
>
> It's just a way of avoiding division by zero.

oh, correct :)

> > While looking into the logic of 'lazy_scan_strategy', I think the idea
> > looks very good but the only thing is that
> > we have kept eager freeze and eager scan completely independent.
> > Don't you think that if a table is chosen for an eager scan
> > then we should force the eager freezing as well?
>
> Earlier versions of the patch kind of worked that way.
> lazy_scan_strategy would actually use twice the GUC setting to
> determine scanning strategy. That approach could make our "transition
> from lazy to eager strategies" involve an excessive amount of
> "catch-up freezing" in the VACUUM operation that advanced relfrozenxid
> for the first time, which you see an example of here:
>
> https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Freezing/skipping_strategies_patch:_motivating_examples#Patch
>
> Now we treat the scanning and freezing strategies as two independent
> choices. Of course they're not independent in any practical sense, but
> I think it's slightly simpler and more elegant that way -- it makes
> the GUC vacuum_freeze_strategy_threshold strictly about freezing
> strategy, while still leading to VACUUM advancing relfrozenxid in a
> way that makes sense. It just happens as a second order effect. Why
> add a special case?

I think that it makes sense to keep 'vacuum_freeze_strategy_threshold'
strictly for freezing. But the point is that the eager scanning
strategy is driven by table freezing needs of the table (tableagefrac)
that make sense, but if we have selected the eager freezing based on
the table age and its freezing need then why don't we force the eager
freezing as well if we have selected eager scanning, after all the
eager scanning is selected for satisfying the freezing need. But
OTOH, the eager scanning might get selected if it appears that we
might not have to scan too many extra pages compared to lazy scan so
in those cases forcing the eager freezing might not be wise. So maybe
it is a good idea to keep them the way you have in your patch.

--
Regards,
Dilip Kumar
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com