Re: Berserk Autovacuum (let's save next Mandrill)

On Tue, 2020-03-10 at 09:56 +1300, David Rowley wrote:
> > > Lack of a scale_factor does leave people who regularly truncate their
> > > "append-only" tables out in the cold a bit.  Perhaps they'd like
> > > index-only scans to kick in soon after they truncate without having to
> > > wait for 10 million tuples, or so.
> > 
> > That point I don't see.
> > Truncating a table resets the counters to 0.
> 
> The scenario there is that if we don't have any
> autovacuum_vacuum_insert_scale_factor and we set the threshold to 10
> million tuples.  The user truncates the table on a monthly basis and
> nearer to the end of the month the tuples accumulates around 100
> million tuples, roughly 3.2 million are inserted per day, so
> auto-vacuum kicks in for this table around once every 3 days.  At the
> start of the month, the table is truncated and it begins refilling.
> The n_ins_since_vacuum is reset to 0 during the truncate. Meanwhile,
> the table is being queried constantly and it takes 3 days for us to
> vacuum the table again. Queries hitting the table are unable to use
> Index Only Scans for 3 days.  The DBAs don't have a lot of control
> over this.
> 
> I think we can help users with that by giving them a bit more control
> over when auto-vacuum will run for the table. scale_factor and
> threshold.

Oh, that's a good point.
I only thought about anti-wraparound vacuum, but the feature might be useful
for index-only scans as well.

Yours,
Laurenz Albe