The existing logic for updating pg_class.reltuples trusted the sampling
results only for the pages ANALYZE actually visited, preferring to
believe the previous tuple density estimate for all the unvisited pages.
While there's some rationale for doing that for VACUUM (first that
VACUUM is likely to visit a very nonrandom subset of pages, and second
that we know for sure that the unvisited pages did not change), there's
no such rationale for ANALYZE: by assumption, it's looked at an unbiased
random sample of the table's pages. Furthermore, in a very large table
ANALYZE will have examined only a tiny fraction of the table's pages,
meaning it cannot slew the overall density estimate very far at all.
In a table that is physically growing, this causes reltuples to increase
nearly proportionally to the change in relpages, regardless of what is
actually happening in the table. This has been observed to cause reltuples
to become so much larger than reality that it effectively shuts off
autovacuum, whose threshold for doing anything is a fraction of reltuples.
(Getting to the point where that would happen seems to require some
additional, not well understood, conditions. But it's undeniable that if
reltuples is seriously off in a large table, ANALYZE alone will not fix it
in any reasonable number of iterations, especially not if the table is
continuing to grow.)
Hence, restrict the use of vac_estimate_reltuples() to VACUUM alone,
and in ANALYZE, just extrapolate from the sample pages on the assumption
that they provide an accurate model of the whole table. If, by very bad
luck, they don't, at least another ANALYZE will fix it; in the old logic
a single bad estimate could cause problems indefinitely.
In HEAD, let's remove vac_estimate_reltuples' is_analyze argument
altogether; it was never used for anything and now it's totally pointless.
But keep it in the back branches, in case any third-party code is calling
this function.
Per bug #15005. Back-patch to all supported branches.
David Gould, reviewed by Alexander Kuzmenkov, cosmetic changes by me
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20180117164916.3fdcf2e9@engels
The PostgreSQL contrib tree
---------------------------
This subtree contains porting tools, analysis utilities, and plug-in
features that are not part of the core PostgreSQL system, mainly
because they address a limited audience or are too experimental to be
part of the main source tree. This does not preclude their
usefulness.
User documentation for each module appears in the main SGML
documentation.
When building from the source distribution, these modules are not
built automatically, unless you build the "world" target. You can
also build and install them all by running "make all" and "make
install" in this directory; or to build and install just one selected
module, do the same in that module's subdirectory.
Some directories supply new user-defined functions, operators, or
types. To make use of one of these modules, after you have installed
the code you need to register the new SQL objects in the database
system by executing a CREATE EXTENSION command. In a fresh database,
you can simply do
CREATE EXTENSION module_name;
See the PostgreSQL documentation for more information about this
procedure.
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