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.
The logic introduced in commit b69bf30b9b
and repaired in commits 669c7d20e6 and
7be47c56af helps to ensure that we don't
overwrite old multixact member information while it is still needed,
but a user who creates many large multixacts can still exhaust the
member space (and thus start getting errors) while autovacuum stands
idly by.
To fix this, progressively ramp down the effective value (but not the
actual contents) of autovacuum_multixact_freeze_max_age as member space
utilization increases. This makes autovacuum more aggressive and also
reduces the threshold for a manual VACUUM to perform a full-table scan.
This patch leaves unsolved the problem of ensuring that emergency
autovacuums are triggered even when autovacuum=off. We'll need to fix
that via a separate patch.
Thomas Munro and Robert Haas
When there are cost-delay-related storage options set for a table,
trying to make that table participate in the autovacuum cost-limit
balancing algorithm produces undesirable results: instead of using the
configured values, the global values are always used,
as illustrated by Mark Kirkwood in
http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/52FACF15.8020507@catalyst.net.nz
Since the mechanism is already complicated, just disable it for those
cases rather than trying to make it cope. There are undesirable
side-effects from this too, namely that the total I/O impact on the
system will be higher whenever such tables are vacuumed. However, this
is seen as less harmful than slowing down vacuum, because that would
cause bloat to accumulate. Anyway, in the new system it is possible to
tweak options to get the precise behavior one wants, whereas with the
previous system one was simply hosed.
This has been broken forever, so backpatch to all supported branches.
This might affect systems where cost_limit and cost_delay have been set
for individual tables.
Previously we were piggybacking on transaction ID parameters to freeze
multixacts; but since there isn't necessarily any relationship between
rates of Xid and multixact consumption, this turns out not to be a good
idea.
Therefore, we now have multixact-specific freezing parameters:
vacuum_multixact_freeze_min_age: when to remove multis as we come across
them in vacuum (default to 5 million, i.e. early in comparison to Xid's
default of 50 million)
vacuum_multixact_freeze_table_age: when to force whole-table scans
instead of scanning only the pages marked as not all visible in
visibility map (default to 150 million, same as for Xids). Whichever of
both which reaches the 150 million mark earlier will cause a whole-table
scan.
autovacuum_multixact_freeze_max_age: when for cause emergency,
uninterruptible whole-table scans (default to 400 million, double as
that for Xids). This means there shouldn't be more frequent emergency
vacuuming than previously, unless multixacts are being used very
rapidly.
Backpatch to 9.3 where multixacts were made to persist enough to require
freezing. To avoid an ABI break in 9.3, VacuumStmt has a couple of
fields in an unnatural place, and StdRdOptions is split in two so that
the newly added fields can go at the end.
Patch by me, reviewed by Robert Haas, with additional input from Andres
Freund and Tom Lane.
Commit 37484ad2aa invalidated a good
chunk of documentation, so patch it up to reflect the new state of
play. Along the way, patch remaining documentation references to
FrozenXID to say instead FrozenTransactionId, so that they match the
way we actually spell it in the code.