Re: New strategies for freezing, advancing relfrozenxid early

Hi,

On 2023-01-25 17:28:48 -0800, Peter Geoghegan wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 25, 2023 at 5:15 PM Andres Freund <andres(at)anarazel(dot)de> wrote:
> > However, it significantly increases the overall work when rows have a somewhat
> > limited lifetime. The documented reason why vacuum_freeze_min_age exist -
> > although I think it doesn't really achieve its documented goal anymore, after
> > the recent changes page-level freezing changes.
>
> Huh? vacuum_freeze_min_age hasn't done that, at all. At least not
> since the visibility map went in back in 8.4:

My point was the other way round. That vacuum_freeze_min_age *prevented* us
from freezing rows "too soon" - obviously a very blunt instrument.

Since page level freezing, it only partially does that, because we'll freeze
even newer rows, if pruning triggered an FPI (I don't think that's quite the
right check, but that's a separate discussion).

As far as I can tell, with the eager strategy, the only thing
vacuum_freeze_min_age really influences is whether we'll block waiting for a
cleanup lock. IOW, VACUUM on a table > vacuum_freeze_strategy_threshold is
now a slightly less-blocking version of VACUUM FREEZE.

The paragraph I was referencing:
<para>
One disadvantage of decreasing <varname>vacuum_freeze_min_age</varname> is that
it might cause <command>VACUUM</command> to do useless work: freezing a row
version is a waste of time if the row is modified
soon thereafter (causing it to acquire a new XID). So the setting should
be large enough that rows are not frozen until they are unlikely to change
any more.
</para>

But now vacuum_freeze_min_age doesn't reliably influence whether we'll freeze
row anymore.

Am I missing something here?

> > > VACUUM determines its freezing strategy based on the value of the new
> > > vacuum_freeze_strategy_threshold GUC (or reloption) with logged tables;
> > > tables that exceed the size threshold use the eager freezing strategy.
> >
> > I think that's not a sufficient guard at all. The size of a table doesn't say
> > much about how a table is used.
>
> Sufficient for what purpose?

Not not regress a substantial portion of our userbase.

Greetings,

Andres Freund