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.
Most of the documentation uses "single-user mode", so use that in the
code as well. Adjust the documentation to match the new error message
wording. Also add a documentation index entry for "single-user mode".
Based-on-patch-by: Jeff Janes <jeff.janes@gmail.com>
The documentation mentioned setting autovacuum_freeze_max_age to
"its maximum allowed value of a little less than two billion".
This led to a post asking about the exact maximum allowed value,
which is precisely two billion, not "a little less".
Based on question by Radovan Jablonovsky. Backpatch to 8.3.
ANALYZE now accepts foreign tables and allows the table's FDW to control
how the sample rows are collected. (But only manual ANALYZEs will touch
foreign tables, for the moment, since among other things it's not very
clear how to handle remote permissions checks in an auto-analyze.)
contrib/file_fdw is extended to support this.
Etsuro Fujita, reviewed by Shigeru Hanada, some further tweaking by me.
Document that routine vacuuming is now also important for the purpose
of index-only scans; and mention in the section that describes the
visibility map that it is used to implement index-only scans.
Marti Raudsepp, with some changes by me.
The endterm attribute is mainly useful when the toolchain does not support
automatic link target text generation for a particular situation. In the
past, this was required by the man page tools for all reference page links,
but that is no longer the case, and it now actually gets in the way of
proper automatic link text generation. The only remaining use cases are
currently xrefs to refsects.
VACUUM FULL INPLACE), along with a boatload of subsidiary code and complexity.
Per discussion, the use case for this method of vacuuming is no longer large
enough to justify maintaining it; not to mention that we don't wish to invest
the work that would be needed to make it play nicely with Hot Standby.
Aside from the code directly related to old-style VACUUM FULL, this commit
removes support for certain WAL record types that could only be generated
within VACUUM FULL, redirect-pointer removal in heap_page_prune, and
nontransactional generation of cache invalidation sinval messages (the last
being the sticking point for Hot Standby).
We still have to retain all code that copes with finding HEAP_MOVED_OFF and
HEAP_MOVED_IN flag bits on existing tuples. This can't be removed as long
as we want to support in-place update from pre-9.0 databases.
adopted for EXPLAIN. This will allow additional options to be implemented
in future without having to make them fully-reserved keywords. The old syntax
remains available for existing options, however.
Itagaki Takahiro
Explain how vacuum_freeze_table_age should be tuned, and how it relates
to the other settings. Mention that vacuum_freeze_table_age also affects
when autovacuum scans the whole table.
per-table overrides of parameters.
This removes a whole class of problems related to misusing the catalog,
and perhaps more importantly, gives us pg_dump support for the parameters.
Based on a patch by Euler Taveira de Oliveira, heavily reworked by me.
vacuuming (it's not), say "database-wide VACUUM" instead of "full-database
VACUUM" in the relevant hint messages. Also, document the permissions needed
to do this. Per today's discussion.
Tom Lane
Peter Eisentraut
Robert Haas
Alvaro Herrera
Bruce Momjian
Andrew Dunstan
Noah Misch
Kevin Grittner
Magnus Hagander
Heikki Linnakangas