>
> Another idea that might conceivably be useful to you on 9.6 is to
reorganize the bulk deletions so that most of them aren't at the endpoint
> of the live id range. If you made it so that the extremal values are
> deleted last, you'd never hit this behavior.
>
> regards, tom lane
>
Hm, I am not sure I understood your suggestion. We'd still need to find a
range of ids to delete, and the order by asc has the nice property that it
moves old records first, which helps tables with a lot of activity on
recently created tuples (and I suppose an ordering in the other direction
would suffer from the same problem).