This fixes various typos, duplicated words, and tiny bits of whitespace
mainly in code comments but also in docs.
Author: Daniel Gustafsson <daniel@yesql.se>
Author: Heikki Linnakangas <hlinnaka@iki.fi>
Author: Alexander Lakhin <exclusion@gmail.com>
Author: David Rowley <dgrowleyml@gmail.com>
Author: Nazir Bilal Yavuz <byavuz81@gmail.com>
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/3F577953-A29E-4722-98AD-2DA9EFF2CBB8@yesql.se
First, we shouldn't recommend switching to single-user mode, because
that's terrible advice. Especially on newer versions where VACUUM
will enter emergency mode when nearing (M)XID exhaustion, it's
perfectly fine to just VACUUM in multi-user mode. Doing it that way
is less disruptive and avoids disabling the safeguards that prevent
actual wraparound, so recommend that instead.
Second, be more precise about what is going to happen (when we're
nearing the limits) or what is happening (when we actually hit them).
The database doesn't shut down, nor does it refuse all commands. It
refuses commands that assign whichever of XIDs and MXIDs are nearly
exhausted.
No back-patch. The existing hint that advises going to single-user
mode is sufficiently awful advice that removing it or changing it
might be justifiable even though we normally avoid changing
user-facing messages in back-branches, but I (rhaas) felt that it
was better to be more conservative and limit this fix to master
only. Aside from the usual risk of breaking translations, people
might be used to the existing message, or even have monitoring
scripts that look for it.
Alexander Alekseev, John Naylor, Robert Haas, reviewed at various
times by Peter Geoghegan, Hannu Krosing, and Andres Freund.
Discussion: http://postgr.es/m/CA+TgmoZBg95FiR9wVQPAXpGPRkacSt2okVge+PKPPFppN7sfnQ@mail.gmail.com
The old documentation encourages entering single-user mode for no
reason, which is a bad plan in most cases. Instead, discourage users
from doing that, and explain the limited cases in which it may be
desirable.
The old documentation claims that running VACUUM as anyone but the
superuser can't possibly work, which is not really true, because it
might be that some other user has enough permissions to VACUUM all
the tables that matter. Weaken the language just a bit.
The old documentation claims that you can't run any commands
when near XID exhaustion, which is false because you can still
run commands that don't require an XID, like a SELECT without a
locking clause.
The old documentation doesn't clearly explain that it's a good idea
to get rid of prepared transactons, long-running transactions, and
replication slots that are preventing (M)XID horizon advancement.
Spell out the steps to do that.
Also, discourage the use of VACUUM FULL and VACUUM FREEZE in
this type of scenario.
Back-patch to v14. Much of this is good advice on all supported
versions, but before 60f1f09ff4
the chances of VACUUM failing in multi-user mode were much higher.
Alexander Alekseev, John Naylor, Robert Haas, reviewed at various
times by Peter Geoghegan, Hannu Krosing, and Andres Freund.
Discussion: http://postgr.es/m/CA+TgmoYtsUDrzaHcmjFhLzTk1VEv29mO_u-MT+XWHrBJ_4nD8A@mail.gmail.com
VACUUM VERBOSE/autovacuuming logging have reported on the number of
pages frozen by VACUUM since commit d977ffd9 added that capability.
This information is directly related to relfrozenxid advancement, so
update an older tip from the documentation about how relfrozenxid is
reported on by the same instrumentation code. Now the tip directly
mentions newly frozen pages, too.
Eager freezing strategy avoids large build-ups of all-visible pages. It
makes VACUUM trigger page-level freezing whenever doing so will enable
the page to become all-frozen in the visibility map. This is useful for
tables that experience continual growth, particularly strict append-only
tables such as pgbench's history table. Eager freezing significantly
improves performance stability by spreading out the cost of freezing
over time, rather than doing most freezing during aggressive VACUUMs.
It complements the insert autovacuum mechanism added by commit b07642db.
VACUUM determines its freezing strategy based on the value of the new
vacuum_freeze_strategy_threshold GUC (or reloption) with logged tables.
Tables that exceed the size threshold use the eager freezing strategy.
Unlogged tables and temp tables always use eager freezing strategy,
since the added cost is negligible there. Non-permanent relations won't
incur any extra overhead in WAL written (for the obvious reason), nor in
pages dirtied (since any extra freezing will only take place on pages
whose PD_ALL_VISIBLE bit needed to be set either way).
VACUUM uses lazy freezing strategy for logged tables that fall under the
GUC size threshold. Page-level freezing triggers based on the criteria
established in commit 1de58df4, which added basic page-level freezing.
Eager freezing is strictly more aggressive than lazy freezing. Settings
like vacuum_freeze_min_age still get applied in just the same way in
every VACUUM, independent of the strategy in use. The only mechanical
difference between eager and lazy freezing strategies is that only the
former applies its own additional criteria to trigger freezing pages.
Note that even lazy freezing strategy will trigger freezing whenever a
page happens to have required that an FPI be written during pruning,
provided that the page will thereby become all-frozen in the visibility
map afterwards (due to the FPI optimization from commit 1de58df4).
The vacuum_freeze_strategy_threshold default setting is 4GB. This is a
relatively low setting that prioritizes performance stability. It will
be reviewed at the end of the Postgres 16 beta period.
Author: Peter Geoghegan <pg@bowt.ie>
Reviewed-By: Jeff Davis <pgsql@j-davis.com>
Reviewed-By: Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>
Reviewed-By: Matthias van de Meent <boekewurm+postgres@gmail.com>
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAH2-WzkFok_6EAHuK39GaW4FjEFQsY=3J0AAd6FXk93u-Xq3Fg@mail.gmail.com
This includes removing documentation for stats_temp_directory, adding
documentation for stats_fetch_consistency, rephrasing references to the stats
collector and documenting that starting a cleanly shut down standby will not
remove stats anymore. The latter point might require further wordsmithing, it
wasn't easy to adjust some of the existing content.
Author: Kyotaro Horiguchi <horikyota.ntt@gmail.com>
Author: Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>
Reviewed-By: Thomas Munro <thomas.munro@gmail.com>
Reviewed-By: Justin Pryzby <pryzby@telsasoft.com>
Reviewed-By: "David G. Johnston" <david.g.johnston@gmail.com>
Reviewed-By: Lukas Fittl <lukas@fittl.com>
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20220303021600.hs34ghqcw6zcokdh@alap3.anarazel.de
When VACUUM set relfrozenxid before now, it set it to whatever value was
used to determine which tuples to freeze -- the FreezeLimit cutoff.
This approach was very naive. The relfrozenxid invariant only requires
that new relfrozenxid values be <= the oldest extant XID remaining in
the table (at the point that the VACUUM operation ends), which in
general might be much more recent than FreezeLimit.
VACUUM now carefully tracks the oldest remaining XID/MultiXactId as it
goes (the oldest remaining values _after_ lazy_scan_prune processing).
The final values are set as the table's new relfrozenxid and new
relminmxid in pg_class at the end of each VACUUM. The oldest XID might
come from a tuple's xmin, xmax, or xvac fields. It might even come from
one of the table's remaining MultiXacts.
Final relfrozenxid values must still be >= FreezeLimit in an aggressive
VACUUM (FreezeLimit still acts as a lower bound on the final value that
aggressive VACUUM can set relfrozenxid to). Since standard VACUUMs
still make no guarantees about advancing relfrozenxid, they might as
well set relfrozenxid to a value from well before FreezeLimit when the
opportunity presents itself. In general standard VACUUMs may now set
relfrozenxid to any value > the original relfrozenxid and <= OldestXmin.
Credit for the general idea of using the oldest extant XID to set
pg_class.relfrozenxid at the end of VACUUM goes to Andres Freund.
Author: Peter Geoghegan <pg@bowt.ie>
Reviewed-By: Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>
Reviewed-By: Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com>
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAH2-WzkymFbz6D_vL+jmqSn_5q1wsFvFrE+37yLgL_Rkfd6Gzg@mail.gmail.com
VACUUM VERBOSE and autovacuum log reports were taught to report the
details of how VACUUM advanced relfrozenxid (and relminmxid) by commit
872770fd. Highlight this by adding a "Tip" to the documentation, next
to related discussion of age(relfrozenxid) monitoring.
Author: Peter Geoghegan <pg@bowt.ie>
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAH2-Wzk0C1O-MKkOrj4YAfsGRru2=cA2VQpqM-9R1HNuG3nFaQ@mail.gmail.com
Adjust the documentation's coverage of aggressive VACUUMs to make it
clearer that aggressive vacuuming isn't always strictly necessary. It's
possible for non-aggressive VACUUMs to advance relfrozenxid/relminmxid
without fail, given the right workload conditions.
While this has always been true, it matters more with recent and pending
improvements to VACUUM. These improvements make non-aggressive
vacuuming more likely to advance relfrozenxid/relminmxid in practice.
While this is an unrelated improvement to the docs, formally speaking,
it still doesn't seem worth backpatching. So don't backpatch.
Remove circular "25.1.5.1. Multixacts And Wraparound" link that
references the section that the link itself appears in. An explanation
of MultiXactId age appears only a few sentences before the link, so
there's no question that the link is superfluous at best.
Oversight in commit d5409295.
Author: Peter Geoghegan <pg@bowt.ie>
Backpatch: 14-
When dealing with partitioned tables, counters for partitioned tables
are not updated when modifying child tables. This means autoanalyze may
not update optimizer statistics for the parent relations, which can
result in poor plans for some queries.
It's worth documenting this limitation, so that people are aware of it
and can take steps to mitigate it (e.g. by setting up a script executing
ANALYZE regularly).
Backpatch to v10. Older branches are affected too, of couse, but we no
longer maintain those.
Author: Justin Pryzby
Reviewed-by: Zhihong Yu, Tomas Vondra
Backpatch-through: 10
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20210913035409.GA10647%40telsasoft.com
This reverts the following commits:
1b5617eb84 Describe (auto-)analyze behavior for partitioned tables
0e69f705cc Set pg_class.reltuples for partitioned tables
41badeaba8 Document ANALYZE storage parameters for partitioned tables
0827e8af70 autovacuum: handle analyze for partitioned tables
There are efficiency issues in this code when handling databases with
large numbers of partitions, and it doesn't look like there isn't any
trivial way to handle those. There are some other issues as well. It's
now too late in the cycle for nontrivial fixes, so we'll have to let
Postgres 14 users continue to manually deal with ANALYZE their
partitioned tables, and hopefully we can fix the issues for Postgres 15.
I kept [most of] be280cdad2 ("Don't reset relhasindex for partitioned
tables on ANALYZE") because while we added it due to 0827e8af70, it is
a good bugfix in its own right, since it affects manual analyze as well
as autovacuum-induced analyze, and there's no reason to revert it.
I retained the addition of relkind 'p' to tables included by
pg_stat_user_tables, because reverting that would require a catversion
bump.
Also, in pg14 only, I keep a struct member that was added to
PgStat_TabStatEntry to avoid breaking compatibility with existing stat
files.
Backpatch to 14.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20210722205458.f2bug3z6qzxzpx2s@alap3.anarazel.de
The docs mentioned expression indexes as a way to improve selectivity
estimates for functions, but we have a second option to improve that by
creating extended statistics. So mention that too.
Reported-by: Justin Pryzby
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20210505210947.GA27406%40telsasoft.com
Comment fixes are applied on HEAD, and documentation improvements are
applied on back-branches where needed.
Author: Justin Pryzby
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20210408164008.GJ6592@telsasoft.com
Backpatch-through: 9.6
Some sections of the documentation used "exclusive lock" to describe
that an ACCESS EXCLUSIVE lock is taken during a given operation. This
can be confusing to the reader as ACCESS SHARE is allowed with an
EXCLUSIVE lock is used, but that would not be the case with what is
described on those parts of the documentation.
Author: Greg Rychlewski
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAKemG7VptD=7fNWckFMsMVZL_zzvgDO6v2yVmQ+ZiBfc_06kCQ@mail.gmail.com
Backpatch-through: 9.6
SQL commands are generally marked up as <command>, except when a link
to a reference page is used using <xref>. But the latter doesn't
create monospace markup, so this looks strange especially when a
paragraph contains a mix of links and non-links.
We considered putting <command> in the <refentrytitle> on the target
side, but that creates some formatting side effects elsewhere.
Generally, it seems safer to solve this on the link source side.
We can't put the <xref> inside the <command>; the DTD doesn't allow
this. DocBook 5 would allow the <command> to have the linkend
attribute itself, but we are not there yet.
So to solve this for now, convert the <xref>s to <link> plus
<command>. This gives the correct look and also gives some more
flexibility what we can put into the link text (e.g., subcommands or
other clauses). In the future, these could then be converted to
DocBook 5 style.
I haven't converted absolutely all xrefs to SQL command reference
pages, only those where we care about the appearance of the link text
or where it was otherwise appropriate to make the appearance match a
bit better. Also in some cases, the links where repetitive, so in
those cases the links where just removed and replaced by a plain
<command>. In cases where we just want the link and don't
specifically care about the generated link text (typically phrased
"for further information see <xref ...>") the xref is kept.
Reported-by: Dagfinn Ilmari Mannsåker <ilmari@ilmari.org>
Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/87o8pco34z.fsf@wibble.ilmari.org
We have edge-case bugs when assigning values in the last few dozen pages
before the wrap limit. We may introduce similar bugs in the future. At
default BLCKSZ, this makes such bugs unreachable outside of single-user
mode. Also, when VACUUM began to consume mxacts, multiStopLimit did not
change to compensate.
pg_upgrade may fail on a cluster that was already printing "must be
vacuumed" warnings. Follow the warning's instructions to clear the
warning, then run pg_upgrade again. One can still, peacefully consume
98% of XIDs or mxacts, so DBAs need not change routine VACUUM settings.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20200621083513.GA3074645@rfd.leadboat.com
Warnings start 10M transactions before xidStopLimit, which is 11M
transactions before wraparound. The sample WARNING output showed a
value greater than 11M, and its HINT message predated commit
25ec228ef7. Hence, the sample was
impossible. Back-patch to 9.5 (all supported versions).
Use xreflabel attributes instead of endterm attributes to control the
appearance of links to subsections of SQL command reference pages.
This is simpler, it matches what we do elsewhere (e.g. for GUC variables),
and it doesn't draw "Unresolved ID reference" warnings from the PDF
toolchain.
Fix some places where the text was absolutely dependent on an <xref>
rendering exactly so, by using a <link> around the required text
instead. At least one of those spots had already been turned into
bad grammar by subsequent changes, and the whole idea is just too
fragile for my taste. <xref> does NOT have fixed output, don't write
as if it does.
Consistently include a page-level link in cross-man-page references,
because otherwise they are useless/nonsensical in man-page output.
Likewise, be consistent about mentioning "below" or "above" in same-page
references; we were doing that in about 90% of the cases, but now it's
100%.
Also get rid of another nonfunctional-in-PDF idea, of making
cross-references to functions by sticking ID tags on <row> constructs.
We can put the IDs on <indexterm>s instead --- which is probably not any
more sensible in abstract terms, but it works where the other doesn't.
(There is talk of attaching cross-reference IDs to most or all of
the docs' function descriptions, but for now I just fixed the two
that exist.)
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/14480.1589154358@sss.pgh.pa.us
Traditionally autovacuum has only ever invoked a worker based on the
estimated number of dead tuples in a table and for anti-wraparound
purposes. For the latter, with certain classes of tables such as
insert-only tables, anti-wraparound vacuums could be the first vacuum that
the table ever receives. This could often lead to autovacuum workers being
busy for extended periods of time due to having to potentially freeze
every page in the table. This could be particularly bad for very large
tables. New clusters, or recently pg_restored clusters could suffer even
more as many large tables may have the same relfrozenxid, which could
result in large numbers of tables requiring an anti-wraparound vacuum all
at once.
Here we aim to reduce the work required by anti-wraparound and aggressive
vacuums in general, by triggering autovacuum when the table has received
enough INSERTs. This is controlled by adding two new GUCs and reloptions;
autovacuum_vacuum_insert_threshold and
autovacuum_vacuum_insert_scale_factor. These work exactly the same as the
existing scale factor and threshold controls, only base themselves off the
number of inserts since the last vacuum, rather than the number of dead
tuples. New controls were added rather than reusing the existing
controls, to allow these new vacuums to be tuned independently and perhaps
even completely disabled altogether, which can be done by setting
autovacuum_vacuum_insert_threshold to -1.
We make no attempt to skip index cleanup operations on these vacuums as
they may trigger for an insert-mostly table which continually doesn't have
enough dead tuples to trigger an autovacuum for the purpose of removing
those dead tuples. If we were to skip cleaning the indexes in this case,
then it is possible for the index(es) to become bloated over time.
There are additional benefits to triggering autovacuums based on inserts,
as tables which never contain enough dead tuples to trigger an autovacuum
are now more likely to receive a vacuum, which can mark more of the table
as "allvisible" and encourage the query planner to make use of Index Only
Scans.
Currently, we still obey vacuum_freeze_min_age when triggering these new
autovacuums based on INSERTs. For large insert-only tables, it may be
beneficial to lower the table's autovacuum_freeze_min_age so that tuples
are eligible to be frozen sooner. Here we've opted not to zero that for
these types of vacuums, since the table may just be insert-mostly and we
may otherwise freeze tuples that are still destined to be updated or
removed in the near future.
There was some debate to what exactly the new scale factor and threshold
should default to. For now, these are set to 0.2 and 1000, respectively.
There may be some motivation to adjust these before the release.
Author: Laurenz Albe, Darafei Praliaskouski
Reviewed-by: Alvaro Herrera, Masahiko Sawada, Chris Travers, Andres Freund, Justin Pryzby
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAC8Q8t%2Bj36G_bLF%3D%2B0iMo6jGNWnLnWb1tujXuJr-%2Bx8ZCCTqoQ%40mail.gmail.com
It's important users be able to know (without looking at the source code)
that running DDL or DDL-like commands can interrupt autovacuum which can
lead to a lot of dead tuples and hence slower database operations.
Reported-by: James Coleman
Author: James Coleman
Reviewed-by: Amit Kapila
Backpatch-through: 9.4
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAAaqYe-XYyNwML1=f=gnd0qWg46PnvD=BDrCZ5-L94B887XVxQ@mail.gmail.com
The documentation includes a section about index maintenance and
reindexing, mentioning a set of steps based on CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY
and ALTER TABLE (for constraint dependencies) to emulate REINDEX
CONCURRENTLY. Now that REINDEX CONCURRENTLY is supported, let's just
directly mention it instead.
Reported-by: Peter Geoghegan
Author: Michael Paquier
Reviewed-by: Peter Eisentraut, Tom Lane
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAH2-WzmEL168t6w29aKrKXtpq9-apcmp0HC7K-fKt6ZgLXV6Dg@mail.gmail.com
Currently there are two ways to trigger log rotation in logging collector
process: call pg_rotate_logfile() SQL-function or send SIGUSR1 signal directly
to logging collector process. However, it's nice to have more suitable way
for external tools to do that, which wouldn't require SQL connection or
knowledge of logging collector pid. This commit implements triggering log
rotation by "pg_ctl logrotate" command.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20180416.115435.28153375.horiguchi.kyotaro%40lab.ntt.co.jp
Author: Kyotaro Horiguchi, Alexander Kuzmenkov, Alexander Korotkov
Since some preparation work had already been done, the only source
changes left were changing empty-element tags like <xref linkend="foo">
to <xref linkend="foo"/>, and changing the DOCTYPE.
The source files are still named *.sgml, but they are actually XML files
now. Renaming could be considered later.
In the build system, the intermediate step to convert from SGML to XML
is removed. Everything is build straight from the source files again.
The OpenSP (or the old SP) package is no longer needed.
The documentation toolchain instructions are updated and are much
simpler now.
Peter Eisentraut, Alexander Lakhin, Jürgen Purtz
For DocBook XML compatibility, don't use SGML empty tags (</>) anymore,
replace by the full tag name. Add a warning option to catch future
occurrences.
Alexander Lakhin, Jürgen Purtz
Mostly, explain how row xmin's used to be replaced by FrozenTransactionId
and no longer are. Do a little copy-editing on the side.
Per discussion with Egor Rogov. Back-patch to 9.4 where the behavioral
change occurred.
Discussion: <575D7955.6060209@postgrespro.ru>
We didn't have any real user documentation about how index-only scans
work or how to design indexes to exploit them. Remedy that.
Per gripe from David Johnston.
Commit a892234f83 gave us enough
infrastructure to avoid vacuuming pages where every tuple on the
page is already frozen. So, replace the notion of a scan_all or
whole-table vacuum with the less onerous notion of an "aggressive"
vacuum, which will pages that are all-visible, but still skip those
that are all-frozen.
This should greatly reduce the cost of anti-wraparound vacuuming
on large clusters where the majority of data is never touched
between one cycle and the next, because we'll no longer have to
read all of those pages only to find out that we don't need to
do anything with them.
Patch by me, reviewed by Masahiko Sawada.
These were discussed in three different sections of the manual, which
unsurprisingly had diverged over time; and the descriptions of individual
variables lacked stylistic consistency even within each section (and
frequently weren't in very good English anyway). Clean up the mess, and
remove some of the redundant information in hopes that future additions
will be less likely to re-introduce inconsistency. For instance I see
no need for maintenance.sgml to include its very own list of all the
autovacuum storage parameters, especially since that list was already
incomplete.
Analysis by Noah Misch shows that the 25% threshold set by commit
53bb309d2d is lower than any other,
similar autovac threshold. While we don't know exactly what value
will be optimal for all users, it is better to err a little on the
high side than on the low side. A higher value increases the risk
that users might exhaust the available space and start seeing errors
before autovacuum can clean things up sufficiently, but a user who
hits that problem can compensate for it by reducing
autovacuum_multixact_freeze_max_age to a value dependent on their
average multixact size. On the flip side, if the emergency cap
imposed by that patch kicks in too early, the user will experience
excessive wraparound scanning and will be unable to mitigate that
problem by configuration. The new value will hopefully reduce the
risk of such bad experiences while still providing enough headroom
to avoid multixact member exhaustion for most users.
Along the way, adjust the documentation to reflect the effects of
commit 04e6d3b877, which taught
autovacuum to run for multixact wraparound even when autovacuum
is configured off.
Daniel Gustafsson
Bruce Momjian
Robert Haas
Peter Geoghegan
Andres Freund
Tomas Vondra
Alvaro Herrera
Michael Paquier
Peter Eisentraut
Noah Misch
Tom Lane
David Rowley
Amit Kapila
Alexander Korotkov
Peter Eisentraut
Simon Riggs