Magnus Hagander <magnus@hagander.net> writes:
> Oh sure, but there is clearly *something* going on, so we should try to
> figure that out. Because a transaction running multiple independent selects
> with the defaults settings will not actually block autovacuum.
I don't think the OP is claiming that autovacuum is blocked, only that
it's failing to remove recently-dead rows that he thinks could be removed.
The reason that's not so is that whether or not transaction A *has*
touched table B is irrelevant. It *could* read table B at any moment,
for all autovacuum knows. Therefore we cannot remove rows that should
still be visible to A's snapshot.
There are some approximations involved in figuring out which rows are
potentially still visible to someone. So perhaps this is a situation
where an approximation is being used and tighter analysis would have
shown that indeed a row could be removed. But we haven't seen any
evidence of that so far. The basic fact that A's snapshot is limiting
removal of rows from a table it has not touched is not a bug.
regards, tom lane