Re: Eager page freeze criteria clarification

On Wed, Dec 13, 2023 at 12:24 PM Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Great results.

Thanks!

> On Sat, Dec 9, 2023 at 5:12 AM Melanie Plageman
> <melanieplageman@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Values can be "removed" from the accumulator by simply decrementing its
> > cardinality and decreasing the sum and sum squared by a value that will
> > not change the mean and standard deviation of the overall distribution.
> > To adapt to a table's changing access patterns, we'll need to remove
> > values from this accumulator over time, but this patch doesn't yet
> > decide when to do this. A simple solution may be to cap the cardinality
> > of the accumulator to the greater of 1% of the table size, or some fixed
> > number of values (perhaps 200?). Even without such removal of values,
> > the distribution recorded in the accumulator will eventually skew toward
> > more recent data, albeit at a slower rate.
>
> I think we're going to need something here. Otherwise, after 6 months
> of use, changing a table's perceived access pattern will be quite
> difficult.
>
> I think one challenge here is to find something that doesn't decay too
> often and end up with cases where it basically removes all the data.
>
> As long as you avoid that, I suspect that the algorithm might not be
> terribly sensitive to other kinds of changes. If you decay after 200
> values or 2000 or 20,000, it will only affect how fast we can change
> our notion of the access pattern, and my guess would be that any of
> those values would produce broadly acceptable results, with some
> differences in the details. If you decay after 200,000,000 values or
> not at all, then I think there will be problems.

I'll add the decay logic and devise a benchmark that will exercise it.
I can test at least one or two of these ideas.

> > The goal is to keep pages frozen for at least target_freeze_duration.
> > target_freeze_duration is in seconds and pages only have a last
> > modification LSN, so target_freeze_duration must be converted to LSNs.
> > To accomplish this, I've added an LSNTimeline data structure, containing
> > XLogRecPtr, TimestampTz pairs stored with decreasing precision as they
> > age. When we need to translate the guc value to LSNs, we linearly
> > interpolate it on this timeline. For the time being, the global
> > LSNTimeline is in PgStat_WalStats and is only updated by vacuum. There
> > is no reason it can't be updated with some other cadence and/or by some
> > other process (nothing about it is inherently tied to vacuum). The
> > cached translated value of target_freeze_duration is stored in each
> > table's stats. This is arbitrary as it is not a table-level stat.
> > However, it needs to be located somewhere that is accessible on
> > update/delete. We may want to recalculate it more often than once per
> > table vacuum, especially in case of long-running vacuums.
>
> This part sounds like it isn't quite baked yet. The idea of the data
> structure seems fine, but updating it once per vacuum sounds fairly
> unprincipled to me? Don't we want the updates to happen on a somewhat
> regular wall clock cadence?

Yes, this part was not fully baked. I actually discussed this with
Andres at PGConf EU last week and he suggested that background writer
update the LSNTimeline. He also suggested I propose the LSNTimeline in
a new thread. I could add a pageinspect function returning the
estimated time of last page modification given the page LSN (so it is
proposed with a user).

- Melanie