Re: CPU-intensive autovacuuming

Phil,

If you complete this patch, I'm very interested to see it.

I think I'm the person Matthew is talking about who inserted a sleep
value. Because of the sheer number of tables involved, even small
values of sleep caused pg_autovacuum to iterate too slowly over its
table lists to be of use in a production environment (where I still
find its behavior to be preferable to a complicated list of manual
vacuums performed in cron).

--
Thomas F. O'Connell
Co-Founder, Information Architect
Sitening, LLC

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On Jun 7, 2005, at 6:16 AM, Phil Endecott wrote:

> Matthew T. O'Connor wrote:
>
>> Phil Endecott wrote:
>>
>>> > Could it be that there is some code in autovacuum that is O
>>> (n^2) in
>>> > the number of tables?
>>>
>>> Browsing the code using webcvs, I have found this:
>>>
>>> for (j = 0; j < PQntuples(res); j++)
>>> {
>>> tbl_elem = DLGetHead(dbs->table_list);
>>> while (tbl_elem != NULL)
>>> { Have I correctly understood what is going on here?
>>>
>
>
>> Indeed you have. I have head a few similar reports but perhaps
>> none as bad as yours. One person put a small sleep value so that
>> it doesn't spin so tight. You could also just up the sleep delay
>> so that it doesn't do this work quite so often. No other quick
>> suggestions.
>>
>
> I do wonder why autovacuum is keeping its table list in memory
> rather than in the database.
>
> But given that it is keeping it in memory, I think the real fix is
> to sort that list (or keep it ordered when building or updating
> it). It is trivial to also get the query results ordered, and they
> can then be compared in O(n) time.
>
> I notice various other places where there seem to be nested loops,
> e.g. in the update_table_list function. I'm not sure if they can
> be fixed by similar means.
>
> --Phil.