Re: New IndexAM API controlling index vacuum strategies

On Sun, Dec 27, 2020 at 11:41 PM Peter Geoghegan <pg(at)bowt(dot)ie> wrote:
> I experimented with this today, and I think that it is a good way to
> do it. I like the idea of choose_vacuum_strategy() understanding that
> heap pages that are subject to many non-HOT updates have a "natural
> extra capacity for LP_DEAD items" that it must care about directly (at
> least with non-default heap fill factor settings). My early testing
> shows that it will often take a surprisingly long time for the most
> heavily updated heap page to have more than about 100 LP_DEAD items.

Attached is a rough patch showing what I did here. It was applied on
top of my bottom-up index deletion patch series and your
poc_vacuumstrategy.patch patch. This patch was written as a quick and
dirty way of simulating what I thought would work best for bottom-up
index deletion for one specific benchmark/test, which was
non-hot-update heavy. This consists of a variant pgbench with several
indexes on pgbench_accounts (almost the same as most other bottom-up
deletion benchmarks I've been running). Only one index is "logically
modified" by the updates, but of course we still physically modify all
indexes on every update. I set fill factor to 90 for this benchmark,
which is an important factor for how your VACUUM patch works during
the benchmark.

This rough supplementary patch includes VACUUM logic that assumes (but
doesn't check) that the table has heap fill factor set to 90 -- see my
changes to choose_vacuum_strategy(). This benchmark is really about
stability over time more than performance (though performance is also
improved significantly). I wanted to keep both the table/heap and the
logically unmodified indexes (i.e. 3 out of 4 indexes on
pgbench_accounts) exactly the same size *forever*.

Does this make sense?

Anyway, with a 15k TPS limit on a pgbench scale 3000 DB, I see that
pg_stat_database shows an almost ~28% reduction in blks_read after an
overnight run for the patch series (it was 508,820,699 for the
patches, 705,282,975 for the master branch). I think that the VACUUM
component is responsible for some of that reduction. There were 11
VACUUMs for the patch, 7 of which did not call lazy_vacuum_heap()
(these 7 VACUUM operations all only dead a btbulkdelete() call for the
one problematic index on the table, named "abalance_ruin", which my
supplementary patch has hard-coded knowledge of).

--
Peter Geoghegan