Re: New strategies for freezing, advancing relfrozenxid early

Hi,

On 2023-01-25 17:37:17 -0800, Peter Geoghegan wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 25, 2023 at 5:26 PM Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de> wrote:
> > Another bad scenario: Some longrunning / hung transaction caused us to get
> > close to the xid wraparound. Problem was resolved, autovacuum runs. Previously
> > we wouldn't have frozen the portion of the table that was actively changing,
> > now we will. Consequence: We get closer to the "no write" limit / the outage
> > lasts longer.
> 
> Obviously it isn't difficult to just invent a new rule that gets
> applied by lazy_scan_strategy. For example, it would take me less than
> 5 minutes to write a patch that disables eager freezing when the
> failsafe is in effect.

Sure. I'm not saying that these issues cannot be addressed. Of course no patch
of a meaningful size is perfect and we all can't predict the future. But this
is a very significant behavioural change to vacuum, and there are pretty
simple scenarios in which it causes significant regressions. And at least some
of the issues have been pointed out before.

Greetings,

Andres Freund