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Kevin Grittner b19e4250b4 Fix performance problems with autovacuum truncation in busy workloads.
In situations where there are over 8MB of empty pages at the end of
a table, the truncation work for trailing empty pages takes longer
than deadlock_timeout, and there is frequent access to the table by
processes other than autovacuum, there was a problem with the
autovacuum worker process being canceled by the deadlock checking
code. The truncation work done by autovacuum up that point was
lost, and the attempt tried again by a later autovacuum worker. The
attempts could continue indefinitely without making progress,
consuming resources and blocking other processes for up to
deadlock_timeout each time.

This patch has the autovacuum worker checking whether it is
blocking any other thread at 20ms intervals. If such a condition
develops, the autovacuum worker will persist the work it has done
so far, release its lock on the table, and sleep in 50ms intervals
for up to 5 seconds, hoping to be able to re-acquire the lock and
try again. If it is unable to get the lock in that time, it moves
on and a worker will try to continue later from the point this one
left off.

While this patch doesn't change the rules about when and what to
truncate, it does cause the truncation to occur sooner, with less
blocking, and with the consumption of fewer resources when there is
contention for the table's lock.

The only user-visible change other than improved performance is
that the table size during truncation may change incrementally
instead of just once.

This problem exists in all supported versions but is infrequently
reported, although some reports of performance problems when
autovacuum runs might be caused by this. Initial commit is just the
master branch, but this should probably be backpatched once the
build farm and general developer usage confirm that there are no
surprising effects.

Jan Wieck
2012-12-11 14:33:08 -06:00
config Rename USE_INLINE to PG_USE_INLINE 2012-10-09 11:17:33 -03:00
contrib Fix pg_upgrade for invalid indexes 2012-12-11 15:09:22 -05:00
doc doc: Remove blastwave.org link 2012-12-10 22:40:47 -05:00
src Fix performance problems with autovacuum truncation in busy workloads. 2012-12-11 14:33:08 -06:00
.gitignore Add gitignore for mingw/cygwin build outputs 2011-06-09 18:11:47 +02:00
aclocal.m4
configure Remove -Wlogical-op from standard compiler flags 2012-11-23 16:24:24 -05:00
configure.in Remove -Wlogical-op from standard compiler flags 2012-11-23 16:24:24 -05:00
COPYRIGHT Update copyright notices for year 2012. 2012-01-01 18:01:58 -05:00
GNUmakefile.in Make init-po and update-po recursive make targets 2012-06-29 14:01:54 +03:00
Makefile Allow make check in PL directories 2011-02-15 06:52:12 +02:00
README Remove useless whitespace at end of lines 2010-11-23 22:34:55 +02:00
README.git Trivial typo fix. 2010-09-21 14:16:00 -04:00

PostgreSQL Database Management System
=====================================

This directory contains the source code distribution of the PostgreSQL
database management system.

PostgreSQL is an advanced object-relational database management system
that supports an extended subset of the SQL standard, including
transactions, foreign keys, subqueries, triggers, user-defined types
and functions.  This distribution also contains C language bindings.

PostgreSQL has many language interfaces, many of which are listed here:

	http://www.postgresql.org/download

See the file INSTALL for instructions on how to build and install
PostgreSQL.  That file also lists supported operating systems and
hardware platforms and contains information regarding any other
software packages that are required to build or run the PostgreSQL
system.  Changes between all PostgreSQL releases are recorded in the
file HISTORY.  Copyright and license information can be found in the
file COPYRIGHT.  A comprehensive documentation set is included in this
distribution; it can be read as described in the installation
instructions.

The latest version of this software may be obtained at
http://www.postgresql.org/download/.  For more information look at our
web site located at http://www.postgresql.org/.