Re: 8.3.0 Core with concurrent vacuum fulls

"Pavan Deolasee" <pavan(dot)deolasee(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> Why not just unconditionally finish the phase 2 as part of InitPostgres ?

You're jumping to a patch before we even understand what's happening.
In particular, if that's the problem, why has this not been seen before?
The fact that it's going through heap_page_prune doesn't seem very
relevant --- VACUUM FULL has certainly always had to invoke
CacheInvalidateHeapTuple someplace or other. So I still want to see
the deadlock report ... we at least need to know which tables are
involved in the deadlock.

A separate line of thought is whether it's a good idea that
heap_page_prune calls the inval code inside a critical section.
That's what's turning an ordinary deadlock failure into a PANIC.
Even without the possibility of having to do cache initialization,
that's a lot of code to be invoking, and it has obvious failure
modes (eg, out of memory for the new inval list item).

regards, tom lane