Re: [HACKERS] 9.4.1 -> 9.4.2 problem: could not access status of transaction 1

On Mon, Jun 8, 2015 at 1:23 PM, Alvaro Herrera  wrote:
> Andres Freund wrote:
>> On June 8, 2015 7:06:31 PM GMT+02:00, Alvaro Herrera  wrote:
>> >I might be misreading the code, but PMSIGNAL_START_AUTOVAC_LAUNCHER
>> >only causes things to happen (i.e. a new worker to be started) when
>> >autovacuum is disabled.  If autovacuum is enabled, postmaster
>> >receives the signal and doesn't do anything about it, because the
>> >launcher is already running.  Of course, regularly scheduled autovac
>> >workers will eventually start running, but perhaps this is not good
>> >enough.
>>
>> Well that's just the same for the plain xid precedent? I'd not mind
>> improving further, but that seems like a separate thing.
>
> Sure.  I just concern that we might be putting excessive trust on
> emergency workers being launched at a high pace.  With normally
> configured systems (naptime=1min) it shouldn't be a problem, but we have
> seen systems with naptime set to one hour or so, and those might feel
> some pain; and it would get worse the more databases you have, because
> people might feel the need to space the autovac runs even more.
>
> (My personal alarm bells go off when I see autovac_naptime=15min or
> more, but apparently not everybody sees things that way.)

Uh, I'd echo that sentiment if you did s/15min/1min/

I think Andres's patch is just improving the existing mechanism so
that it's reliable, and you're proposing something notably different
which might be better, but which is really a different proposal
altogether.

-- 
Robert Haas
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