Document LP_DEAD accounting issues in VACUUM.
Document VACUUM's soft assumption that any LP_DEAD items encountered
during pruning will become LP_UNUSED items before VACUUM finishes up.
This is integral to the accounting used by VACUUM to generate its final
report on the table to the stats collector. It also affects how VACUUM
determines which heap pages are truncatable. In both cases VACUUM is
concerned with the likely contents of the page in the near future, not
the current contents of the page.
This state of affairs created the false impression that VACUUM's dead
tuple accounting had significant difference with similar accounting used
during ANALYZE. There were and are no substantive differences, at least
when the soft assumption completely works out. This is far clearer now.
Also document cases where things don't quite work out for VACUUM's dead
tuple accounting. It's possible that a significant number of LP_DEAD
items will be left behind by VACUUM, and won't be recorded as remaining
dead tuples in VACUUM's statistics collector report. This behavior
dates back to commit a96c41fe, which taught VACUUM to run without index
and heap vacuuming at the user's request. The failsafe mechanism added
to VACUUM more recently by commit 1e55e7d1 takes the same approach to
dead tuple accounting.
Reported-By: Masahiko Sawada <sawada.mshk@gmail.com>
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAH2-Wz=Jmtu18PrsYq3EvvZJGOmZqSO2u3bvKpx9xJa5uhNp=Q@mail.gmail.com
Branch
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master
Details
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https://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/7136bf34f28892362144ae2e350714836a5c0c0c
Modified Files
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src/backend/access/heap/vacuumlazy.c | 55 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++---------
1 file changed, 42 insertions(+), 13 deletions(-)