Re: We need to log aborted autovacuums

On 1/17/11 11:46 AM, Tom Lane wrote:
> Do we actually need a lock timeout either?  The patch that was being
> discussed just involved failing if you couldn't get it immediately.
> I suspect that's sufficient for AV.  At least, nobody's made a
> compelling argument why we need to expend a very substantially larger
> amount of work to do something different.

The argument is that a sufficiently busy table might never get
autovacuumed *at all*, whereas a small lock wait would allow autovacuum
to block incoming transactions and start work.

However, it's hard for me to imagine a real-world situation where a
table would be under repeated full-table-locks from multiple
connections.  Can anyone else?

--                                  -- Josh Berkus                                    PostgreSQL Experts Inc.
                        http://www.pgexperts.com