free space map and visibility map

From: Jeff Janes <jeff(dot)janes(at)gmail(dot)com>
To: pgsql-hackers <pgsql-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org>
Subject: free space map and visibility map
Date: 2017-03-17 18:37:50
Message-ID: CAMkU=1wXkKUKBHWBYzET3D9OViyDg8DcVL-wKEqk2uyoMrzr_A@mail.gmail.com
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With some intensive crash-recovery testing, I've run into a situation where
I get some bad table bloat. There will be large swaths of the table which
are empty (all results from heap_page_items other than lp are either zero
or NULL), but have zero available space in the fsm, and are marked as
all-visible and all-frozen in the vm.

I guess it is a result of a crash causing updates to the fsm to be lost.
Then due to the (crash-recovered) visibility map showing them as all
visible and all frozen, vacuum never touches the pages again, so the fsm
never gets corrected.

'VACUUM (DISABLE_PAGE_SKIPPING) foo;' does fix it, but that seems to be
the only thing that will.

Is there a way to improve this, short of making updates to the fsm be a
wal-logged operation?

It is probably not a very pressing issue, as crashes are normally pretty
rare, I would hope. But it seems worth improving if there is a good way to
do so.

Cheers,

Jeff

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