Re: Autovacuum in the backend

> 2) By no fault of its own, autovacuum's level of granularity is the table
> level. For people dealing with non-trivial amounts of data (and we're not
> talking gigabytes or terabytes here), this is a serious drawback. Vacuum
> at peak times can cause very intense IO bursts -- even with the
> enhancements in 8.0. I don't think the solution to the problem is to give
> users the impression that it is solved and then vacuum their tables during
> peak periods. I cannot stress this enough.

I completly agree with Gavin - integrating this kind of thing into the
backend writer or integrate it with FSM would be the ideal solution.

I guess everybody who has already vacuumed a 2 TB relation will agree
here. VACUUM is not a problem for small "my cat Minka" databases.
However, it has been a real problem on large, heavy-load databases. I
have even seen people splitting large tables and join them with a view
to avoid long vacuums and long CREATE INDEX operations (i am not joking
- this is serious).

postgresql is more an more used to really large boxes. this is an
increasing problem. gavin's approach using a vacuum bitmap seems to be a
good approach. an alternative would be to have some sort of vacuum queue
containing a set of pages which are reported by the writing process (=
backend writer or backends).

best regards,

hans

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