On 12/02/2014 10:35 AM, Alvaro Herrera wrote:
> If the table is large, the time window for this to happen is large also;
> there might never be a time window large enough between two lock
> acquisitions for one autovacuum run to complete in a table. This
> starves the table from vacuuming completely, until things are bad enough
> that an emergency vacuum is forced. By then, the bloat is disastrous.
>
> I think it's that suicide that Andres wants to disable.
A much better solution for this ... and one which would solve a *lot* of
other issues with vacuum and autovacuum ... would be to give vacuum a
way to track which blocks an incomplete vacuum had already visited.
This would be even more valuable for freeze.
--
Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL Experts Inc.
http://pgexperts.com