On Thu, Apr 30, 2015 at 8:05 AM, Simon Riggs <simon@2ndquadrant.com> wrote:
> A much better idea is to work out how to avoid index bloat at cause. If we
> are running an UPDATE and we cannot get a cleanup lock, we give up and do a
> non-HOT update, causing the index to bloat. It seems better to wait for a
> short period to see if we can get the cleanup lock. The short period is
> currently 0, so lets start there and vary the duration of wait upwards
> proportionally as the index gets more bloated.
What I'd be worried about there is that it would be very hard to tune
the wait time, and that the operating system scheduling granularity
(10ms?) would be way too long.
But I'm in vigorous agreement with you on one point: the solution to
index bloat (and probably heap bloat, too) is not to clean it up
faster but to create less of it in the first place. Making more
updates HOT is one way to do that.
--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company