Re: Why do we let autovacuum give up?

"Joshua D. Drake" <jd@commandprompt.com> writes:
> I have run into yet again another situation where there was an 
> assumption that autovacuum was keeping up and it wasn't. It was caused 
> by autovacuum quitting because another process requested a lock.

> In turn we received a ton of bloat on pg_attribute which caused all 
> kinds of other issues (as can be expected).

> The more I run into it, the more it seems like autovacuum should behave 
> like vacuum, in that it gets precedence when it is running. First come, 
> first serve as they say.

1. Back when it worked like that, things were worse.

2. What have you got that is requesting exclusive lock on pg_attribute?
That seems like a pretty unfriendly behavior in itself.
        regards, tom lane