On 12/4/2012 8:06 AM, Kevin Grittner wrote:
Jan Wieck wrote:
I believe the check interval needs to be decoupled from the
deadlock_timeout again.

OK

This will leave us with 2 GUCs at least.

Hmm. What problems do you see with hard-coding reasonable values?

The question is what is reasonable?

Lets talk about the time to (re)acquire the lock first. In the cases where truncating a table can hurt we are dealing with many gigabytes. The original vacuumlazy scan of them can take hours if not days. During that scan the vacuum worker has probably spent many hours napping in the vacuum delay points. For me 50ms interval for 5 seconds would be reasonable for (re)acquiring that lock.

The reasoning behind it being that we need some sort of retry mechanism because if autovacuum just gave up the exclusive lock because someone needed access, it is more or less guaranteed that the immediate attempt to reacquire it will fail until that waiter has committed. But if it can't get a lock after 5 seconds, the system seems busy enough so that autovacuum should come back much later, when the launcher kicks it off again.

I don't care much about occupying that autovacuum worker for a few seconds. It just spent hours vacuuming that very table. How much harm will a couple more seconds do?

The check interval for the LockHasWaiters() call however depends very much on the response time constraints of the application. A 200ms interval for example would cause the truncate phase to hold onto the exclusive lock for 200ms at least. That means that a steady stream of short running transactions would see a 100ms "blocking" on average, 200ms max. For many applications that is probably OK. If your response time constraint is <=50ms on 98% of transactions, you might want to have that knob though.

I admit I really have no idea what the most reasonable default for that value would be. Something between 50ms and deadlock_timeout/2 I guess.


Jan

--
Anyone who trades liberty for security deserves neither
liberty nor security. -- Benjamin Franklin


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