Re: Removing more vacuumlazy.c special cases, relfrozenxid optimizations

Hi,

On 2022-03-30 21:29:16 -0700, Peter Geoghegan wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 30, 2022 at 9:20 PM Andres Freund <andres(at)anarazel(dot)de> wrote:
> > But the debug elog reports that
> >
> > relfrozenxid updated 714 -> 717
> > relminmxid updated 1 -> 6
> >
> > Tthe problem is that the crashing backend reads the relfrozenxid/relminmxid
> > from the shared relcache init file written by another backend:
>
> We should have added logging of relfrozenxid and relminmxid a long time ago.

At least at DEBUG1 or such.

> > This is basically the inverse of a54e1f15 - we read a *newer* horizon. That's
> > normally fairly harmless - I think.
>
> Is this one pretty old?

What do you mean with "this one"? The cause for the assert failure?

I'm not sure there's a proper bug on HEAD here. I think at worst it can delay
the horizon increasing a bunch, by falsely not using an aggressive vacuum when
we should have - might even be limited to a single autovacuum cycle.

> > Perhaps we should just fetch the horizons from the "local" catalog for shared
> > rels?
>
> Not sure what you mean.

Basically, instead of relying on the relcache, which for shared relation is
vulnerable to seeing "too new" horizons due to the shared relcache init file,
explicitly load relfrozenxid / relminmxid from the the catalog / syscache.

I.e. fetch the relevant pg_class row in heap_vacuum_rel() (using
SearchSysCache[Copy1](RELID)). And use that to set vacrel->relfrozenxid
etc. Whereas right now we only fetch the pg_class row in
vac_update_relstats(), but use the relcache before.

Greetings,

Andres Freund