On Mon, Mar 25, 2013 at 9:53 PM, Kevin Grittner <kgrittn@ymail.com> wrote:
> That would make it harder to construct a degenerate case
I don't think it's hard at all. It's the same as the case Simon wants
to solve except that the cost is incurred in a different way. Imagine
a system where there's a huge data load to a table which is then
read-only for an OLTP system. Until vacuum comes along -- and it may
never since the table never sees deletes or updates -- every
transaction needs to do a clog lookup for every tuple it sees. That
means a significant cpu slowdown for every row lookup forever more. To
save a one-time i/o cost.
--
greg