Re: Writing Commit Status hint bits (was Re: [HACKERS] Constant

On Tue, 2005-07-19 at 22:24 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> Simon Riggs <simon@2ndquadrant.com> writes:
> > Short patch enclosed to turn off writing of commit-status hint bits.
>
> Doesn't this entirely destroy the ability to truncate clog, and
> therefore the ability to survive XID wraparound?

I hope not for all our sakes, since the hint bits are not WAL logged and
anything that relies upon them would be fragile. If we were going to
move a table to WORM storage, then we'd have done VACUUM FREEZE first
anyway, which would be required to avoid XID wraparound. This patch
would then guarantee that no further system-initiated writes take place.

Not AFAICS.... comments from vacuum.c included:

/*
* Now scan all the pages that we moved tuples onto and update tuple
* status bits.  This is not really necessary, but will save time for
* future transactions examining these tuples.
*/
update_hint_bits(onerel, fraged_pages, num_fraged_pages,
last_move_dest_block, num_moved);

then again on the function itself...

/*
* update_hint_bits() -- update hint bits in destination pages
*
* Scan all the pages that we moved tuples onto and update tuple status
bits.
* This is normally not really necessary, but it will save time for
future
* transactions examining these tuples.
*

*
* For the non-freeze case, one wonders whether it wouldn't be better to
skip
* this work entirely, and let the tuple status updates happen someplace
* that's not holding an exclusive lock on the relation.
*/

> It probably also breaks subxact and multixact logging, but I haven't
> looked closely...

AFAIK this has nothing to do with that, since those locks are not
persistent across a crash,,,but conceivably something in 2PC might be
effected.

Best Regards, Simon Riggs