Re: Vaccuming dead rows on busy databases

Tom Lane wrote:
> "Greg Sabino Mullane" <greg(at)turnstep(dot)com> writes:
>> I'd like to see something like VACUUM FULL WAIT. :)
>
> Sounds like a deadlock waiting to happen :-(
>
> AFAIK the general practice is to just accept the fact that vacuum can't
> remove recently-dead tuples. You should look into whether you can't
> shorten your transactions --- very-long-running transactions create
> other performance issues besides vacuum not removing stuff.

It seems to me that the most common support problem I keep seeing on the
mailing lists is VACUUM not working well because of long running
transactions. If I understand it correctly, people have talked about
reducing the problem by tracking xmin (or something, sorry if I'm
getting this wrong) on a per table basis rather and per cluster. Now
I'm sure this is not simple and I know I don't have the skills to do it,
but I think it would resolve (or at least significantly mitigate) what I
perceive as one of the biggest usage problems with PostgreSQL.

Comments?