Re: autovacuum_work_mem

On 19 October 2013 19:22, Peter Geoghegan <pg(at)heroku(dot)com> wrote:

> I won't repeat the rationale for the patch here.

I can't see the problem that this patch is trying to solve. I'm having
trouble understanding when I would use this.

VACUUM uses 6 bytes per dead tuple. And autovacuum regularly removes
dead tuples, limiting their numbers.

In what circumstances will the memory usage from multiple concurrent
VACUUMs become a problem? In those circumstances, reducing
autovacuum_work_mem will cause more passes through indexes, dirtying
more pages and elongating the problem workload.

I agree that multiple concurrent VACUUMs could be a problem but this
doesn't solve that, it just makes things worse.

Freezing doesn't require any memory at all, so wraparound vacuums
won't be controlled by this parameter.

Can we re-state what problem actually is here and discuss how to solve
it. (The reference [2] didn't provide a detailed explanation of the
problem, only the reason why we want a separate parameter).

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