Re: Autovacuum not keeping up. (PG 9.2.9)

Sent from my iPad

> On Jul 31, 2014, at 9:40 AM, Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@2ndquadrant.com> wrote:
>
> jesper@krogh.cc wrote:
>> Hi.
>>
>> I have a large  database with a message queue table, that has high
>> activity. The database supports 1-300 client connection concurrently,
>> having transactions open in up to 30 minutes each.
>>
>> Recently I am seeing autuvacuum being issued, but it takes
>> ages to get through the message queue table, with strace showing waiting
>> for semop's for 10's to 100's of seconds.
>
> Do you have data on how relfrozenxid advances for that table?
>
> Vacuuming needs to grab a "cleanup lock" on each page it's going to
> vacuum, which is a special kind of lock that requires that no other
> process is even looking at the page at that moment (we call this "to
> have the page pinned"), which is even weaker than having a shared lock
> on the page.  If traffic to some pages is high, it might be difficult
> for vacuum to acquire this.
>
> Normally, vacuum doesn't break much sweat about this: if it cannot
> acquire the cleanup lock, it ignores the page, keeps calm and carries
> on.  But if it's a for-wraparound vacuuming, it will need to wait until
> it is able to acquire cleanup lock.
>
> I think one idea might be to try to manually vacuum the table once in a
> while with a reduced value of min_freeze_table_age.  This will cause a
> full table scan (i.e. cleanup lock for all pages is waited for), which
> decreases the "frozen xid age", which moves the need to do this again
> further in the future; so the autovacuum-invoked vacuums will be able to
> skip the pages on which it cannot get cleanup lock.
>
> Another idea is to increase min_freeze_table_age for the queue table
> through ALTER TABLE, the idea being that you can delay forced vacuuming
> of hot pages for long enough that they can wait until they have cooled
> off.  Default value is 150 million transactions, which you can raise
> tenfold and even higher.
>
> See
> http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.2/static/runtime-config-client.html#GUC-VACUUM-FREEZE-TABLE-AGE
>
>
> The other idea is that heap truncation is what's causing the problem,
> but AFAICS that uses conditional lock acquisition so you shouldn't be
> seeing stalls in semop().
>
> --
> Álvaro Herrera                http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
> PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Training & Services
>
>
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You should probably consider, if you haven't done already, to partition this table. Without knowing what's adding new
transactions,it sounds like you could break up the table with a timestamp rule. That would permit autovacuum to do
partsof the table much quicker, and only once. 
-/
Jay