Re: Unexpected page allocation behavior on insert-only tables

Excerpts from Michael Renner's message of sáb may 15 20:24:36 -0400 2010:
> On 16.05.2010 02:16, Tom Lane wrote:
> > Michael Renner<michael.renner@amd.co.at>  writes:
> >> I've written a simple tool to generate traffic on a database [1], which
> >> did about 30 TX/inserts per second to a table. Upon inspecting the data
> >> in the table, I noticed the expected grouping of tuples which came from
> >> a single backend to matching pages [2]. The strange part was that the
> >> pages weren't completely filled but the backends seemed to jump
> >> arbitrarily from one page to the next [3]. For the table in question
> >> this resulted in about 10% wasted space.
> >
> > Which table would that be?  The trigger-driven updates to "auction",
> > in particular, would certainly guarantee some amount of "wasted" space.
> 
> Yeah, the auction table receives heavy updates and gets vacuumed regularly.
> 
> The behavior I showed was for the "bid" table, which only gets inserts 
> (and triggers the updates for the auction table).

I think this may be related to the smgr_targblock stuff; if the relcache
entry gets invalidated at the wrong time for whatever reason, the
"current page" could be abandoned in favor of extending the rel.  This
has changed since 8.4, but a quick perusal suggests that it should be
less likely on 9.0 than 8.4 but maybe there's something weird going on.
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