Re: Why do we let autovacuum give up?

On Fri, Jan 24, 2014 at 2:44 PM, Josh Berkus <josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com> wrote:
> On 01/23/2014 07:22 PM, Alvaro Herrera wrote:
>>> If you ask me, I'd like autovac to know when not to run (or rather
>>> > wait a bit, not forever), perhaps by checking load factors or some
>>> > other tell-tale of an already-saturated I/O system.
>> We had a proposed design to tell autovac when not to run (or rather,
>> when to switch settings very high so that in practice it'd never run).
>> At some point somebody said "but we can just change autovacuum=off in
>> postgresql.conf via crontab when the high load period starts, and turn
>> it back on afterwards" --- and that was the end of it.
>
> Anything which depends on a timing-based feedback loop is going to be
> hopeless. Saying "autovac shouldn't run if load is high" sounds like a
> simple statement, until you actually try to implement it.

Exactly.

But people tuning autovac down are doing exactly that: trying to tune
autovac to background-only work. They *must* then launch foreground
vacuums, at times they deem sensible, when doing that.

So, problem is not of people tuning down autovacuum, but of them
forgetting to vacuum explicitly after doing so.