[HACKERS] Realtime VACUUM, was: performance of insert/delete/update

tom lane wrote:
> Sure, it's just shuffling the housekeeping work from one place to
> another. The thing that I like about Postgres' approach is that we
> put the housekeeping in a background task (VACUUM) rather than in the
> critical path of foreground transaction commit.

Thinking with my marketing hat on, MVCC would be a much bigger win if VACUUM
was not required (or was done automagically). The need for periodic VACUUM
just gives ammunition to the PostgreSQL opponents who can claim we are
deferring work but that it amounts to the same thing.

A fully automatic background VACUUM will significantly reduce but will not
eliminate this perceived weakness.

However, it always seemed to me there should be some way to reuse the space
more dynamically and quickly than a background VACUUM thereby reducing the
percentage of tuples that are expired in heavy update cases. If only a very
tiny number of tuples on the disk are expired this will reduce the aggregate
performance/space penalty of MVCC into insignificance for the majority of
uses.

Couldn't we reuse tuple and index space as soon as there are no transactions
that depend on the old tuple or index values. I have imagined that this was
always part of the long-term master plan.

Couldn't we keep a list of dead tuples in shared memory and look in the list
first when deciding where to place new values for inserts or updates so we
don't have to rely on VACUUM (even a background one)? If there are expired
tuple slots in the list these would be used before allocating a new slot from
the tuple heap.

The only issue is determining the lowest transaction ID for in-process
transactions which seems relatively easy to do (if it's not already done
somewhere).

In the normal shutdown and startup case, a tuple VACUUM could be performed
automatically. This would normally be very fast since there would not be many
tuples in the list.

Index slots would be handled differently since these cannot be substituted
one for another. However, these could be recovered as part of every index
page update. Pages would be scanned before being written and any expired
slots that had transaction ID's lower than the lowest active slot would be
removed. This could be done for non-leaf pages as well and would result in
only reorganizing a page that is already going to be written thereby not
adding much to the overall work.

I don't think that internal pages that contain pointers to values in nodes
further down the tree that are no longer in the leaf nodes because of this
partial expired entry elimination will cause a problem since searches and
scans will still work fine.

Does VACUUM do something that could not be handled in this realtime manner?

- Curtis