Re: Eager page freeze criteria clarification

On Mon, Aug 28, 2023 at 5:06 PM Peter Geoghegan <pg@bowt.ie> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Aug 28, 2023 at 1:17 PM Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> wrote:
> > I'm sure this could be implemented, but it's unclear to me why you
> > would expect it to perform well. Freezing a page that has no frozen
> > tuples yet isn't cheaper than freezing one that does, so for this idea
> > to be a win, the presence of frozen tuples on the page would have to
> > be a signal that the page is likely to be modified again in the near
> > future. In general, I don't see any reason why we should expect that
> > to be the case.
>
> What I've described in a scheme for deciding to not freeze where that
> would usually happen -- a scheme for *vetoing* page freezing -- rather
> than a scheme for deciding to freeze. On its own, what I suggested
> cannot help at all. It assumes a world in which we're already deciding
> to freeze much more frequently, based on whatever other criteria. It's
> intended to complement something like the LSN scheme.

I like the direction of this idea. It could avoid repeatedly freezing
a page that is being modified over and over. I tried it out with a
short-running version of workload I (approximating a work queue) --
and it prevents unnecessary freezing.

The problem with this criterion is that if you freeze a page and then
ever modify it again -- even once, vacuum will not be allowed to
freeze it again until it is forced to. Perhaps we could use a very
strict LSN cutoff for pages which contain any frozen tuples -- for
example: only freeze a page containing a mix of frozen and unfrozen
tuples if it has not been modified since before the last vacuum of the
relation ended.

- Melanie