Re: New strategies for freezing, advancing relfrozenxid early

On Thu, Sep 15, 2022 at 12:09 AM John Naylor
<john(dot)naylor(at)enterprisedb(dot)com> wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 14, 2022 at 11:33 PM Peter Geoghegan <pg(at)bowt(dot)ie> wrote:
> > The final number of TIDs doesn't seem like the most interesting
> > information that VM snapshots could provide us when it comes to
> > building the dead_items TID data structure -- the *distribution* of
> > TIDs across heap pages seems much more interesting. The "shape" can be
> > known ahead of time, at least to some degree. It can help with
> > compression, which will reduce cache misses.
>
> My point here was simply that spilling to disk is an admission of
> failure to utilize memory efficiently and thus shouldn't be a selling
> point of VM snapshots. Other selling points could still be valid.

I was trying to explain the goals of this work in a way that was as
accessible as possible. It's not easy to get the high level ideas
across, let alone all of the details.

It's true that I have largely ignored the question of how VM snapshots
will need to spill up until now. There are several reasons for this,
most of which you could probably guess. FWIW it wouldn't be at all
difficult to add *some* reasonable spilling behavior very soon; the
underlying access patterns are highly sequential and predictable, in
the obvious way.

--
Peter Geoghegan