Re: Vacuum ERRORs out considering freezing dead tuples from before OldestXmin

On Thu, Jun 20, 2024 at 7:42 PM Melanie Plageman
<melanieplageman(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> We can fix this by always removing tuples considered dead before
> VacuumCutoffs->OldestXmin.

I don't have a great feeling about this fix. It's not that I think
it's wrong. It's just that the underlying problem here is that we have
heap_page_prune_and_freeze() getting both GlobalVisState *vistest and
struct VacuumCutoffs *cutoffs, and the vistest wants to be in charge
of deciding what gets pruned, but that doesn't actually work, because
as I pointed out in
http://postgr.es/m/CA+Tgmob1BtWcP6R5-toVHB5wqHasPTSR2TJkcDCutMzaUYBaHQ@mail.gmail.com
it's not properly synchronized with vacrel->cutoffs.OldestXmin. Your
fix is to consider both variables, which again may be totally correct,
but wouldn't it be a lot better if we didn't have two variables
fighting for control of the same behavior?

(I'm not trying to be a nuisance here -- I think it's great that
you've done the work to pin this down and perhaps there is no better
fix than what you've proposed.)

--
Robert Haas
EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com