On 11/29/14, 2:22 AM, Andres Freund wrote:
Hi,

I've more than once seen that autovacuums on certain tables never
succeed because regular exclusive (or similar) lockers cause it to give
way/up before finishing.  Usually if some part of the application uses
explicit exclusive locks.

In general I think it's quite imortant that autovacuum bheaves that
way. But I think it might be worhtwile to offer an option to disable
that behaviour. If some piece of application logic requires exclusive
locks and that leads to complete starvation of autovacuum, there's
really nothing that can be done but to manually schedule vacuums right
now.

I can see two possible solutions:

1) Add a reloption that allows to configure whether autovacuum gives way
    to locks acquired by user backends.
2) Add a second set of autovacuum_*_scale_factor variables that governs
    a threshhold after which autovacuum doesn't get cancelled anymore.

Opinions?

What do you mean by "never succeed"? Is it skipping a large number of pages? 
Might re-trying the locks within the same vacuum help, or are the user locks too 
persistent?
--
Jim Nasby, Data Architect, Blue Treble Consulting
Data in Trouble? Get it in Treble! http://BlueTreble.com


--
Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org)
To make changes to your subscription:
http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers

Reply via email to