Since 9.0, removing lots of large objects in a single transaction risks
exceeding max_locks_per_transaction, because we merged large object removal
into the generic object-drop mechanism, which takes out an exclusive lock
on each object to be dropped. This creates a hazard for contrib/vacuumlo,
which has historically tried to drop all unreferenced large objects in one
transaction. There doesn't seem to be any correctness requirement to do it
that way, though; we only need to drop enough large objects per transaction
to amortize the commit costs.
To prevent a regression from pre-9.0 releases wherein vacuumlo worked just
fine, back-patch commits b69f2e3640 and
64c604898e, which break vacuumlo's deletions
into multiple transactions with a user-controllable upper limit on the
number of objects dropped per transaction.
Tim Lewis, Robert Haas, Tom Lane
5bd06e619c