Multi-xacts and our process problem

Multi-xacts were made durable in Postgres 9.3 (released 2013-09-09) to
allow primary-key-column-only locks. 1.7 years later, we are still
dealing with bugs related to this feature. Obviously, something is
wrong.

There were many 9.3 minor releases containing multi-xacts fixes, and
these fixes have extended into 9.4. After the first few bug-fix
releases, I questioned whether we needed to revert or rework the
feature, but got no positive response. Only in the past few weeks have
we got additional people involved.

I think we now know that our inaction didn't serve us well. The
question is how can we identify chronic problems and get resources
involved sooner. I feel we have been "asleep at the wheel" to some
extent on this.

--
Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> http://momjian.us
EnterpriseDB http://enterprisedb.com

+ Everyone has their own god. +