Re: 7.4RC1 planned for Monday

The world rejoiced as jd(at)commandprompt(dot)com ("Joshua D. Drake") wrote:
> 2. More importantly the recent potential discovery by Jan on vacuum.
>
> I have several high end users that are really beating their heads
> against the wall with even lazy vacuum because of how brutal it can
> be on the system. If we could make vacuum a little less harsh it
> could be a large boon.

Boon it would be, I agree.

But from what I can tell, Jan has only just gotten to the point of
being able to replicate the behaviour, with some initial attempts to
address it. He only mentioned it a few days ago. That doesn't
establish that there is a comprehensive answer that's ready to deploy.
Perhaps there will be something next week, but it may very well take
longer.

We have been living with the current conditions for several versions;
if it is tempting enough, perhaps it will argue for a quick 7.4.1.
Indeed, since the functionality has affected various versions, it is
not unthinkable that a solution might even be amenable to backporting.

But there is a point in time at which to say, "Shoot the engineers,
and release the product." :-)

I rather think it would be a risky endeavour to hold things off on the
_possibility_ that something might happen soon on this, particularly
when this was not an expected enhancement.

I'm certainly not arguing against the improvement; in separate
non-news, I'm still lobbying for my suggestion, of a "VACUUM CACHE",
which would go after the 'low hanging fruit' of going after pages that
are currently in memory. No going after whole tables; just the bits
that require no I/O (save for indexes) because they're already known
to be in memory.
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