Re: autovacuum causing numerous regression-test failures

Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> Tom Lane wrote:
>> Not a solution for "make installcheck",
> 
> Well, for "make installcheck" we don't have any control over whether 
> autovacuum has been turned on or off manually anyway.  If you are 
> concerned about build farm reliability, the build farm scripts can 
> surely be made to initialize or start the instance in a particular way.
> 
> Another option might be to turn off stats_row_level on the fly.

I'm sure I'm missing some of the subtleties of make installcheck issues, 
but autovacuum can be enabled / disabled on the fly just as easily as 
stats_row_level, so I don't see the difference?

>>> Or we put manual exceptions for the affected tables into
>>> pg_autovacuum.
>> New feature?  Or does that capability exist already?
> 
> I haven't ever used the pg_autovacuum table but the documentation 
> certainly makes one believe that this is possible.

Right, if it doesn't work, that would certainly be a bug.  This feature 
was included during the original integration into the backend during the 
8.0 dev cycle.

> Let's just consider some of the options a bit more closely, and if they 
> don't work, we'll revert it.

Agreed.