Re: optimizing vacuum truncation scans

On Sat, Jul 25, 2015 at 4:46 AM, Simon Riggs <simon@2ndquadrant.com> wrote:
> On 22 July 2015 at 14:59, Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Urgh.  So if we do this, that forever precludes having HOT pruning set
>> the all-visible bit.
>
> What is the reason why we don't do that already? Surely its a one liner?

I wish!

It actually doesn't look simple to me to modify heap_page_prune to
know whether any not-all-visible items remain at the end.  It's
definitely true that, in order for marking the page all-visible to be
a possibility, we need to reach heap_page_prune_execute() with ndead
== 0.  But that's not enough: we also need to know that any tuple that
survived the prune operation (that is, it wasn't redirected or marked
unused) has a new-enough xmin, which isn't tracked anywhere.
vacuumlazy.c solves that problem by making a second pass over all the
tuples on the page to determine whether the page is all-visible, but
that seems pretty inefficient and I think heap_page_prune() is already
a CPU hog on some workloads.  (Didn't Heikki have a patch to improve
that?)

Another sticky wicket is that, as things stand today, we'd have to
insert a second WAL record to mark the page all-visible, which would
add probably-significant overhead.  We could probably modify the
format of the record we're already emitting for pruning to carry a
flag indicating whether to additionally set PD_ALL_VISIBLE.

-- 
Robert Haas
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