Re: Per table autovacuum vacuum cost limit behaviour strange

On 27/08/14 10:27, Alvaro Herrera wrote:
> Alvaro Herrera wrote:
>
>> So my proposal is a bit more complicated.  First we introduce the notion
>> of a single number, to enable sorting and computations: the "delay
>> equivalent", which is the cost_limit divided by cost_delay.
>
> Here's a patch that implements this idea.  As you see this is quite a
> bit more complicated that Haribabu's proposal.
>
> There are two holes in this:
>
> 1. if you ALTER DATABASE to change vacuum delay for a database, those
> values are not considered in the global equiv delay.  I don't think this
> is very important and anyway we haven't considered this very much, so
> it's okay if we don't handle it.
>
> 2. If you have a "fast worker" that's only slightly faster than regular
> workers, it will become slower in some cases.  This is explained in a
> FIXME comment in the patch.
>
> I don't really have any more time to invest in this, but I would like to
> see it in 9.4.  Mark, would you test this?  Haribabu, how open are you
> to fixing point (2) above?
>


I did some testing with this patch applied.

Minimally tweaking autovacuum (naptime of 5s) with a single table
'cache0' created with a cost limit setting of 10000, running:

$ pgbench -n -c8 -T300 -f volatile0.sql cache

and monitoring the size of 'cache0' table showed a steady state of:


cache=# SELECT pg_relation_size('cache0')/(1024*1024) AS mb;
    mb
------
    85

So far so good. Adding another table 'cache1' similar to the previous
but lacking any per table autovacuum settings, and running 2 pgbench
sessions:

$ pgbench -n -c8 -T300 -f volatile0.sql cache
$ pgbench -n -c8 -T300 -f volatile1.sql cache


(volatile1.sql just uses table 'cache1' instead of 'cache0') shows after
a few minutes:

cache=# SELECT relname,pg_relation_size(oid)/(1024*1024) AS mb
FROM pg_class WHERE relname like 'cache_';
  relname |   mb
---------+--------
  cache0  |    664
  cache1  |   1900

So we are definitely seeing the 'fast' worker being slowed down. Also,
the growth of 'cache1' was only a bit faster than 'cache0' - so the
'slow' worker was getting a speed boost was well.

So looks like good progress, but yeah - point (2) is obviously rearing
its head in this test.

Cheers

Mark