Re: Removing more vacuumlazy.c special cases, relfrozenxid optimizations

On Mon, Dec 20, 2021 at 8:29 PM Masahiko Sawada <sawada(dot)mshk(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> > Can we fully get rid of vacuum_freeze_table_age?
>
> Does it mean that a vacuum always is an aggressive vacuum?

No. Just somewhat more like one. Still no waiting for cleanup locks,
though. Also, autovacuum is still cancelable (that's technically from
anti-wraparound VACUUM, but you know what I mean). And there shouldn't
be a noticeable difference in terms of how many blocks can be skipped
using the VM.

> If opportunistic freezing works well on all tables, we might no longer
> need vacuum_freeze_table_age. But I’m not sure that’s true since the
> cost of freezing tuples is not 0.

That's true, of course, but right now the only goal of opportunistic
freezing is to advance relfrozenxid in every VACUUM. It needs to be
shown to be worth it, of course. But let's assume that it is worth it,
for a moment (perhaps only because we optimize freezing itself in
passing) -- then there is little use for vacuum_freeze_table_age, that
I can see.

> I think that that's true for (mostly) static tables. But regarding
> constantly-updated tables, since autovacuum runs based on the number
> of garbage tuples (or inserted tuples) and how old the relfrozenxid is
> if an autovacuum could not advance the relfrozenxid because it could
> not get a cleanup lock on the page that has the single oldest XID,
> it's likely that when autovacuum runs next time it will have to
> process other pages too since the page will get dirty enough.

I'm not arguing that the age of the single oldest XID is *totally*
irrelevant. Just that it's typically much less important than the
total amount of work we'd have to do (freezing) to be able to advance
relfrozenxid.

In any case, the extreme case where we just cannot get a cleanup lock
on one particular page with an old XID is probably very rare.

> It might be a good idea that we remember pages where we could not get
> a cleanup lock somewhere and revisit them after index cleanup. While
> revisiting the pages, we don’t prune the page but only freeze tuples.

Maybe, but I think that it would make more sense to not use
FreezeLimit for that at all. In an aggressive VACUUM (where we might
actually have to wait for a cleanup lock), why should we wait once the
age is over vacuum_freeze_min_age (usually 50 million XIDs)? The
official answer is "because we need to advance relfrozenxid". But why
not accept a much older relfrozenxid that is still sufficiently
young/safe, in order to avoid waiting for a cleanup lock?

In other words, what if our approach of "being diligent about
advancing relfrozenxid" makes the relfrozenxid problem worse, not
better? The problem with "being diligent" is that it is defined by
FreezeLimit (which is more or less the same thing as
vacuum_freeze_min_age), which is supposed to be about which tuples we
will freeze. That's a very different thing to how old relfrozenxid
should be or can be (after an aggressive VACUUM finishes).

> > On the other hand, the risk may be far greater if we have *many*
> > tuples that are still unfrozen, whose XIDs are only "middle aged"
> > right now. The idea behind vacuum_freeze_min_age seems to be to be
> > lazy about work (tuple freezing) in the hope that we'll never need to
> > do it, but that seems obsolete now. (It probably made a little more
> > sense before the visibility map.)
>
> Why is it obsolete now? I guess that it's still valid depending on the
> cases, for example, heavily updated tables.

Because after the 9.6 freezemap work we'll often set the all-visible
bit in the VM, but not the all-frozen bit (unless we have the
opportunistic freezing patch applied, which specifically avoids that).
When that happens, affected heap pages will still have
older-than-vacuum_freeze_min_age-XIDs after VACUUM runs, until we get
to an aggressive VACUUM. There could be many VACUUMs before the
aggressive VACUUM.

This "freezing cliff" seems like it might be a big problem, in
general. That's what I'm trying to address here.

Either way, the system doesn't really respect vacuum_freeze_min_age in
the way that it did before 9.6 -- which is what I meant by "obsolete".

> I don’t have an objection to increasing autovacuum_freeze_max_age for
> now. One of my concerns with anti-wraparound vacuums is that too many
> tables (or several large tables) will reach autovacuum_freeze_max_age
> at once, using up autovacuum slots and preventing autovacuums from
> being launched on tables that are heavily being updated.

I think that the patch helps with that, actually -- there tends to be
"natural variation" in the relfrozenxid age of each table, which comes
from per-table workload characteristics.

> Given these
> works, expanding the gap between vacuum_freeze_table_age and
> autovacuum_freeze_max_age would have better chances for the tables to
> advance its relfrozenxid by an aggressive vacuum instead of an
> anti-wraparound-aggressive vacuum. 400 million seems to be a good
> start.

The idea behind getting rid of vacuum_freeze_table_age (not to be
confused by the other idea about getting rid of vacuum_freeze_min_age)
is this: with the patch series, we only tend to get an anti-wraparound
VACUUM in extreme and relatively rare cases. For example, we will get
aggressive anti-wraparound VACUUMs on tables that *never* grow, but
constantly get HOT updates (e.g. the pgbench_accounts table with heap
fill factor reduced to 90). We won't really be able to use the VM when
this happens, either.

With tables like this -- tables that still get aggressive VACUUMs --
maybe the patch doesn't make a huge difference. But that's truly the
extreme case -- that is true only because there is already zero chance
of there being a non-aggressive VACUUM. We'll get aggressive
anti-wraparound VACUUMs every time we reach autovacuum_freeze_max_age,
again and again -- no change, really.

But since it's only these extreme cases that continue to get
aggressive VACUUMs, why do we still need vacuum_freeze_table_age? It
helps right now (without the patch) by "escalating" a regular VACUUM
to an aggressive one. But the cases that we still expect an aggressive
VACUUM (with the patch) are the cases where there is zero chance of
that happening. Almost by definition.

> Given the opportunistic freezing, that's true but I'm concerned
> whether opportunistic freezing always works well on all tables since
> freezing tuples is not 0 cost.

That is the big question for this patch.

--
Peter Geoghegan