On 14/02/2019 11:03, Tomas Vondra wrote: > But if you add extra sleep() calls somewhere (say because there's also > limit on WAL throughput), it will affect how fast VACUUM works in > general. Yet it'll continue with the cost-based throttling, but it will > never reach the limits. Say you do another 20ms sleep somewhere. > Suddenly it means it only does 25 rounds/second, and the actual write > limit drops to 4 MB/s.
I think at a first approximation, you probably don't want to add WAL delays to vacuum jobs, since they are already slowed down, so the rate of WAL they produce might not be your first problem. The problem is more things like CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY that run at full speed.
That leads to an alternative idea of expanding the existing cost-based vacuum delay system to other commands.
We could even enhance the cost system by taking WAL into account as an additional factor.
This is really what I was thinking- let’s not have multiple independent ways of slowing down maintenance and similar jobs to reduce their impact on I/o to the heap and to WAL.