via the "flat files" facility. This requires making it enough like a backend
to be able to run transactions; it's no longer an "auxiliary process" but
more like the autovacuum worker processes. Also, its signal handling has
to be brought into line with backends/workers. In particular, since it
now has to handle procsignal.c processing, the special autovac-launcher-only
signal conditions are moved to SIGUSR2.
Alvaro, with some cleanup from Tom
* stats_start_collector goes away; we always start the collector process,
unless prevented by a problem with setting up the stats UDP socket.
* stats_reset_on_server_start goes away; it seems useless in view of the
availability of pg_stat_reset().
* stats_block_level and stats_row_level are merged into a single variable
"track_counts", which controls all reports sent to the collector process.
* stats_command_string is renamed to track_activities.
* log_autovacuum is renamed to log_autovacuum_min_duration to better reflect
its meaning.
The log_autovacuum change is not a compatibility issue since it didn't exist
before 8.3 anyway. The other changes need to be release-noted.
by having the postmaster signal it when certain failures occur. This requires
the postmaster setting a flag in shared memory, but should be as safe as the
pmsignal.c code is.
Also make sure the launcher honor's a postgresql.conf change turning it off
on SIGHUP.
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.
continuously, and requests vacuum runs of "autovacuum workers" to postmaster.
The workers do the actual vacuum work. This allows for future improvements,
like allowing multiple autovacuum jobs running in parallel.
For now, the code keeps the original behavior of having a single autovac
process at any time by sleeping until the previous worker has finished.
accessing it, like DROP DATABASE. This allows the regression tests to pass
with autovacuum enabled, which open the gates for finally enabling autovacuum
by default.
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.
delay and limit, both as global GUCs and as table-specific entries in
pg_autovacuum. stats_reset_on_server_start is now OFF by default,
but a reset is forced if we did WAL replay. XID-wrap vacuums do not
ANALYZE, but do FREEZE if it's a template database. Alvaro Herrera