On 10/20/2016 06:34 AM, Joshua D. Drake wrote: > On 10/19/2016 07:22 PM, Josh Berkus wrote: >> On 10/19/2016 06:27 PM, Joshua D. Drake wrote: >>> Hello, >>> >>> After all these years, we are still regularly running into people who >>> say, "performance was bad so we disabled autovacuum". I am not talking >>> about once in a while, it is often. I would like us to consider removing >>> the autovacuum option. Here are a few reasons: >>> >>> 1. It does not hurt anyone >>> 2. It removes a foot gun >>> 3. Autovacuum is *not* optional, we shouldn't let it be >>> 4. People could still disable it at the table level for those tables >>> that do fall into the small window of, no maintenance is o.k. >>> 5. People would still have the ability to decrease the max_workers to 1 >>> (although I could argue about that too). >> >> People who run data warehouses where all of the data comes in as batch >> loads regularly disable autovacuum, and should do so. For the DW/batch >> load use-case, it makes far more sense to do batch loads interspersed >> with ANALYZEs and VACUUMS of loaded/updated tables. > > Hrm, true although that is by far a minority of our users. What if we > made it so we disabled the autovacuum guc but made it so you could > disable autovacuum per database (ALTER DATABASE SET or something such > thing?).
Well, that wouldn't fix the problem; people would just disable it per database, even if it was a bad idea. If I can't get rid of vacuum_defer_cleanup_age, you're not going to be able to get rid of autovacuum. Now, if you want to "fix" this issue, one thing which would help a lot is making it possible to disable/enable Autovacuum on one table without exclusive locking (for the ALTER statement), and create a how-to doc somewhere which explains how and why to disable autovac per-table. Most of our users don't know that it's even possible to adjust this per-table. -- -- Josh Berkus Red Hat OSAS (any opinions are my own) -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers