On Tue, Mar 14, 2017 at 6:10 PM, Peter Geoghegan <p...@bowt.ie> wrote: > On Tue, Mar 14, 2017 at 2:48 PM, Peter Geoghegan <p...@bowt.ie> wrote: >> I think that that's safe, but it is a little disappointing that it >> does not allow us to skip work in the case that you really had in mind >> when writing the patch. Better than nothing, though, and perhaps still >> a good start. I would like to hear other people's opinions. > > Hmm. So, the SQL-callable function txid_current() exports a 64-bit > XID, which includes an "epoch". If PostgreSQL used these 64-bit XIDs > natively, we'd never need to freeze. Obviously we don't do that > because the per-tuple overhead of visibility information is already > high, and that would make it much worse. But, we can easily afford the > extra overhead in a completely dead page. Maybe we can overcome the > _bt_page_recyclable() limitation by being cleverer about how it > determines if recycling is safe -- it can examine epoch, too. This > would also be required in the similar function > vacuumRedirectAndPlaceholder(), which is a part of SP-GiST. > > We already have BTPageOpaqueData.btpo, a union whose contained type > varies based on the page being dead. We could just do the same with > some other field in that struct, and then store epoch there. Clearly > nobody really cares about most data that remains on the page. Index > scans just need to be able to land on it to determine that it's dead, > and VACUUM needs to be able to determine whether or not there could > possibly be such an index scan at the time it considers recycling.. > > Does anyone see a problem with that?
Wouldn't it break on-disk compatibility with existing btree indexes? I think we're still trying to solve a problem that Simon postulated in advance of evidence that shows how much of a problem it actually is. Not only might that be unnecessary, but if we don't have a test demonstrating the problem, we also don't have a test demonstrating that a given approach fixes it. -- Robert Haas EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers