Re: Decoupling antiwraparound autovacuum from special rules around auto cancellation

Hi,

On 2023-01-18 18:21:33 -0800, Peter Geoghegan wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 5:49 PM Andres Freund <andres(at)anarazel(dot)de> wrote:
> > On 2023-01-18 15:28:19 -0800, Peter Geoghegan wrote:
> > > Perhaps we should make vac_estimate_reltuples focus on the pages that
> > > VACUUM newly set all-visible each time (not including all-visible
> > > pages that got scanned despite being all-visible) -- only that subset
> > > of scanned_pages seems to be truly relevant. That way you wouldn't be
> > > able to do stuff like this. We'd have to start explicitly tracking the
> > > number of pages that were newly set in the VM in vacuumlazy.c to be
> > > able to do that, but that seems like a good idea anyway.
> >
> > Can you explain a bit more what you mean with "focus on the pages" means?
>
> We don't say anything about pages we didn't scan right now -- only
> scanned_pages have new information, so we just extrapolate. Why not go
> even further than that, by only saying something about the pages that
> were both scanned and newly set all-visible?
>
> Under this scheme, the pages that were scanned but couldn't be newly
> set all-visible are treated just like the pages that weren't scanned
> at all -- they get a generic estimate from the existing reltuples.

I don't think that'd work well either. If we actually removed a large chunk of
the tuples in the table it should be reflected in reltuples, otherwise costing
and autovac scheduling suffers. And you might not be able to set all those
page to all-visible, because of more recent rows.

> > I don't think it's hard to see this causing problems. Set
> > autovacuum_vacuum_scale_factor to something smaller than 2% or somewhat
> > frequently vacuum manually. Incrementally delete old data. Unless analyze
> > saves you - which might not be run or might have a different scale factor or
> > not be run manually - reltuples will stay exactly the same, despite data
> > changing substantially.
>
> You seem to be saying that it's a problem if we don't update reltuples
> -- an estimate -- when less than 2% of the table is scanned by VACUUM.
> But why? Why can't we just do nothing sometimes? I mean in general,
> leaving aside the heuristics I came up with for a moment?

The problem isn't that we might apply the heuristic once, that'd be fine. But
that there's nothing preventing it from applying until there basically are no
tuples left, as long as the vacuum is frequent enough.

As a demo: The attached sql script ends up with a table containing 10k rows,
but relpages being set 1 million.

VACUUM foo;
EXPLAIN (ANALYZE) SELECT * FROM foo;
┌───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ QUERY PLAN │
├───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ Seq Scan on foo (cost=0.00..14425.00 rows=1000000 width=4) (actual time=3.251..4.693 rows=10000 loops=1) │
│ Planning Time: 0.056 ms │
│ Execution Time: 5.491 ms │
└───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
(3 rows)

> It will cause problems if we remove the heuristics. Much less
> theoretical problems. What about those?

I don't think what I describe is a theoretical problem.

> How often does VACUUM scan so few pages, anyway? We've been talking
> about how ineffective autovacuum_vacuum_scale_factor is, at great
> length, but now you're saying that it *can* meaningfully trigger not
> just one VACUUM, but many VACUUMs, where no more than 2% of rel_pages
> are not all-visible (pages, not tuples)? Not just once, mind you, but
> many times?

I've seen autovacuum_vacuum_scale_factor set to 0.01 repeatedly. But that's
not even needed - you just need a longrunning transaction preventing at least
one dead row from getting removed and hit autovacuum_freeze_max_age. There'll
be continuous VACUUMs of the table, all only processing a small fraction of
the table.

And I have many times seen bulk loading / deletion scripts that do VACUUM on a
regular schedule, which also could easily trigger this.

> And in the presence of some kind of highly variable tuple
> size, where it actually could matter to the planner at some point?

I don't see how a variable tuple size needs to be involved? As the EXPLAIN
ANALYZE above shows, we'll end up with wrong row count estimates etc.

> I would be willing to just avoid even these theoretical problems if
> there was some way to do so, that didn't also create new problems. I
> have my doubts that that is possible, within the constraints of
> updating pg_class. Or the present constraints, at least. I am not a
> miracle worker -- I can only do so much with the information that's
> available to vac_update_relstats (and/or the information that can
> easily be made available).

I'm worried they might cause new problems.

Greetings,

Andres Freund