processes to be running simultaneously. Also, now autovacuum processes do not
count towards the max_connections limit; they are counted separately from
regular processes, and are limited by the new GUC variable
autovacuum_max_workers.
The launcher now has intelligence to launch workers on each database every
autovacuum_naptime seconds, limited only on the max amount of worker slots
available.
Also, the global worker I/O utilization is limited by the vacuum cost-based
delay feature. Workers are "balanced" so that the total I/O consumption does
not exceed the established limit. This part of the patch was contributed by
ITAGAKI Takahiro.
Per discussion.
Standard English uses "may", "can", and "might" in different ways:
may - permission, "You may borrow my rake."
can - ability, "I can lift that log."
might - possibility, "It might rain today."
Unfortunately, in conversational English, their use is often mixed, as
in, "You may use this variable to do X", when in fact, "can" is a better
choice. Similarly, "It may crash" is better stated, "It might crash".
Standard English uses "may", "can", and "might" in different ways:
may - permission, "You may borrow my rake."
can - ability, "I can lift that log."
might - possibility, "It might rain today."
Unfortunately, in conversational English, their use is often mixed, as
in, "You may use this variable to do X", when in fact, "can" is a better
choice. Similarly, "It may crash" is better stated, "It might crash".
Also update two error messages mentioned in the documenation to match.
in PITR scenarios. We now WAL-log the replacement of old XIDs with
FrozenTransactionId, so that such replacement is guaranteed to propagate to
PITR slave databases. Also, rather than relying on hint-bit updates to be
preserved, pg_clog is not truncated until all instances of an XID are known to
have been replaced by FrozenTransactionId. Add new GUC variables and
pg_autovacuum columns to allow management of the freezing policy, so that
users can trade off the size of pg_clog against the amount of freezing work
done. Revise the already-existing code that forces autovacuum of tables
approaching the wraparound point to make it more bulletproof; also, revise the
autovacuum logic so that anti-wraparound vacuuming is done per-table rather
than per-database. initdb forced because of changes in pg_class, pg_database,
and pg_autovacuum catalogs. Heikki Linnakangas, Simon Riggs, and Tom Lane.
compatibility for release 7.2 and earlier. I have not altered any
mentions of release 7.3 or later. The release notes were not modified,
so the changes are still documented, just not in the main docs.
in the database. The old behavior (reindex system catalogs only) is now
available as REINDEX SYSTEM. I did not add the complementary REINDEX USER
case since there did not seem to be consensus for this, but it would be
trivial to add later. Per recent discussions.
in GetNewTransactionId(). Since the limit value has to be computed
before we run any real transactions, this requires adding code to database
startup to scan pg_database and determine the oldest datfrozenxid.
This can conveniently be combined with the first stage of an attack on
the problem that the 'flat file' copies of pg_shadow and pg_group are
not properly updated during WAL recovery. The code I've added to
startup resides in a new file src/backend/utils/init/flatfiles.c, and
it is responsible for rewriting the flat files as well as initializing
the XID wraparound limit value. This will eventually allow us to get
rid of GetRawDatabaseInfo too, but we'll need an initdb so we can add
a trigger to pg_database.
recommend that people go get Apache's rotatelogs program. Additional
benefits are that configuration is done through GUC, rather than
externally, and that the postmaster can monitor the log rotator and
restart it after failure (though we certainly hope that won't happen
often).
Andreas Pflug, some rework by Tom Lane.
the Admin Guide about routine maintenance tasks. Currently this only
discusses the various reasons for doing VACUUM, but perhaps it could be
fleshed out with topics like log rotation.
Bruce Momjian
Alvaro Herrera
Tom Lane
Peter Eisentraut
Neil Conway
PostgreSQL Daemon
Thomas G. Lockhart