I just collected all the good internals information included in this
thread and popped it onto http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Hint_Bits where
I'll continue to hack away at the text until it's readable. Thanks to
everyone who answered my questions here, that's good progress toward
clearing up a very underdocumented area.
I note a couple of potential TODO items not on the official list yet that
came up during this discussion:
-Smooth latency spikes when switching commit log pages by preallocating
cleared pages before they are needed
-Improve bulk loading by setting "frozen" hint bits for tuple inserts
which occur within the same database transaction as the creation of the
table into which they're being inserted
Did I miss anything? I think everything brought up falls either into one
of those two or the existing "Consider having the background writer update
the transaction status hint bits..." TODO.
--
* Greg Smith gsmith@gregsmith.com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD