Re: pg_stat_bgwriter.buffers_backend is pretty meaningless (and more?)

On Tue, Jan 17, 2023 at 9:22 AM Melanie Plageman
<melanieplageman@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 16, 2023 at 4:42 PM Maciek Sakrejda <m.sakrejda@gmail.com> wrote:
> > I missed a couple of versions, but I think the docs are clearer now.
> > I'm torn on losing some of the detail, but overall I do think it's a
> > good trade-off. Moving some details out to after the table does keep
> > the bulk of the view documentation more readable, and the "inform
> > database tuning" part is great. I really like the idea of a separate
> > Interpreting Statistics section, but for now this works.
> >
> > >+          <literal>vacuum</literal>: I/O operations performed outside of shared
> > >+          buffers while vacuuming and analyzing permanent relations.
> >
> > Why only permanent relations? Are temporary relations treated
> > differently? I imagine if someone has a temp-table-heavy workload that
> > requires regularly vacuuming and analyzing those relations, this point
> > may be confusing without some additional explanation.
>
> Ah, yes. This is a bit confusing. We don't use buffer access strategies
> when operating on temp relations, so vacuuming them is counted in IO
> Context normal. I've added this information to the docs but now that
> definition is a bit long. Perhaps it should be a note? That seems like
> it would draw too much attention to this detail, though...

Thanks for clarifying. I think the updated definition still works:
it's still shorter than the `normal` context definition.