Multi-xacts and our process problem

Multi-xacts were made durable in Postgres 9.3 (released 2013-09-09) to
allow primary-key-column-only locks.  1.7 years later, we are still
dealing with bugs related to this feature.  Obviously, something is
wrong.

There were many 9.3 minor releases containing multi-xacts fixes, and
these fixes have extended into 9.4.  After the first few bug-fix
releases, I questioned whether we needed to revert or rework the
feature, but got no positive response.  Only in the past few weeks have
we got additional people involved.

I think we now know that our inaction didn't serve us well.  The
question is how can we identify chronic problems and get resources
involved sooner.  I feel we have been "asleep at the wheel" to some
extent on this.

--  Bruce Momjian  <bruce@momjian.us>        http://momjian.us EnterpriseDB
http://enterprisedb.com
 + Everyone has their own god. +