Re: [GENERAL] Stuck in a vacuum.

On Tue, 6 Jul 1999, Vadim Mikheev wrote:

> Stuart Rison wrote:
> >
> > Since I thought that probably left the table a bit messed up, I started a:
> >
> > VACUUM blast_hits;
> >
> > It's using 95% of the cpu and seems to be going nowhere (at least not in
> > the 30 minutes it has been running so far).
> >
> > QUESTION 2: What do I do now? Is there any way I can kill the VACUUM or
> > will they be the final nail in the table's coffin?
>
> VACUUM uses transactions so there shouldn't be problems with
> its stopping.
> After that try to drop all indices over blash_hits and re-vacuum
> (in verbose mode).

Vadim - any chance I can get my question answered? It is slightly more
than academic to me as we now have several Pg production databases running
here in my shop...I know you're busy but I am *not* a C programmer and altho
I've read your listing I am still in the dark.

To recap, one of tables caused vacuum to abort with a fatal bit of stderr.
This generated a stale lock which I manually removed. I iterated thru this
ps a few times until I realized that I had to drop table and re-create.
A simple delete from and copy did not resolve the issue. (Pg ver 6.3.2.)

This is a puzzle to me as this table was small...it is now growing daily.
Can you tell me:

1) what causes bufmgr.c to barf and kill vacuum when something is returned
as `-2', ie `PINNED'?

2) how alarmed should I be?

3) is there a recommended fix (and/or a deprecated fix? ;-) How can I avoid

TIA,
Tom

Here is the stderr I mentioned:

NOTICE: BlowawayRelationBuffers(tx_plan, 4): block 4 is referenced (private 0, last 0, global 1)
FATAL 1: VACUUM (vc_rpfheap): BlowawayRelationBuffers returned -2
NOTICE: BlowawayRelationBuffers(tx_plan, 4): block 4 is referenced (private 0, last 0, global 1)
FATAL 1: VACUUM (vc_rpfheap): BlowawayRelationBuffers returned -2
NOTICE: BlowawayRelationBuffers(tx_plan, 4): block 4 is referenced (private 0, last 0, global 1)
FATAL 1: VACUUM (vc_rpfheap): BlowawayRelationBuffers returned -2
NOTICE: BlowawayRelationBuffers(tx_plan, 0): block 4 is referenced (private 0, last 0, global 1)
FATAL 1: VACUUM (vc_vacheap): BlowawayRelationBuffers returned -2

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