Tom Lane wrote:
Heikki Linnakangas <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
I have two runs of DBT-2, one with the patch and one without.

Patched:

autovac "public.stock" scans:1 pages:1285990(-0) tuples:25303056(-2671265) CPU 95.22s/38.02u sec elapsed 10351.17 sec

Unpatched:

autovac "public.stock" scans:1 pages:1284504(-0) tuples:25001369(-1973760) CPU 86.55s/34.70u sec elapsed 9628.13 sec

So that makes this patch a good idea why?  (Maybe what we need to see
is the impact on the total elapsed time for the DBT-2 test, rather
than just the VACUUM runtime.)

The patch is a good idea because the vacuum collected more dead tuples, not because it makes vacuum run faster (it doesn't).

I believe the increase in runtime is caused by some random variations in the test. As I said, there's something going on that server that I don't fully understand. I'll setup another test set.

The impact on the whole DBT-2 test is hard to measure, it would require a long run so that you reach a steady state where tables are not growing because of dead tuples anymore. We'll need to do that anyway, so hopefully I'll get a chance to measure the impact of this patch as well. The effect I'm expecting the patch to have is to make the steady-state size of the stock table smaller, giving more cache hits and less I/O.

BTW I've got serious reservations about whether this bit is safe:

+                       /* The table could've grown since vacuum started, and 
there
+                        * might already be dead tuples on the new pages. Catch 
them
+                        * as well. Also, we want to include any live tuples in 
the
+                        * new pages in the statistics.
+                        */
+                       nblocks = RelationGetNumberOfBlocks(onerel);

I seem to recall some assumptions somewhere in the system that a vacuum
won't visit newly-added pages.

Hmm, I can't think of anything.

Without the patch, there can't be any dead tuples on the newly-added pages, according to the snapshot taken at the beginning of the vacuum, so it would be a waste of time to visit them.

--
  Heikki Linnakangas
  EnterpriseDB   http://www.enterprisedb.com

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