Hello. Once in a while I am asked about table bloat. In most cases the cause is long lasting transactions and vacuum canceling in some cases. Whatever the case users don't have enough clues to why they have bloated tables.
At the top of the annoyances list for users would be that they cannot know whether autovacuum decided that a table needs vacuum or not. I suppose that it could be shown in pg_stat_*_tables. n_mod_since_analyze | 20000 + vacuum_requred | true last_vacuum | 2017-10-10 17:21:54.380805+09 If vacuum_required remains true for a certain time, it means that vacuuming stopped halfway or someone is killing it repeatedly. That status could be shown in the same view. n_mod_since_analyze | 20000 + vacuum_requred | true last_vacuum | 2017-10-10 17:21:54.380805+09 last_autovacuum | 2017-10-10 17:21:54.380805+09 + last_autovacuum_status | Killed by lock conflict Where the "Killed by lock conflict" would be one of the followings. - Completed (oldest xmin = 8023) - May not be fully truncated (yielded at 1324 of 6447 expected) - Truncation skipped - Skipped by lock failure - Killed by lock conflict If we want more formal expression, we can show the values in the following shape. And adding some more values could be useful. n_mod_since_analyze | 20000 + vacuum_requred | true + last_vacuum_oldest_xid | 8023 + last_vacuum_left_to_truncate | 5123 + last_vacuum_truncated | 387 last_vacuum | 2017-10-10 17:21:54.380805+09 last_autovacuum | 2017-10-10 17:21:54.380805+09 + last_autovacuum_status | Killed by lock conflict ... autovacuum_count | 128 + incomplete_autovacuum_count | 53 # The last one might be needless.. Where the "Killed by lock conflict" is one of the followings. - Completed - Truncation skipped - Partially truncated - Skipped - Killed by lock conflict This seems enough to find the cause of a table bloat. The same discussion could be applied to analyze but it might be the another issue. There may be a better way to indicate the vacuum soundness. Any opinions and suggestions are welcome. I'm going to make a patch to do the 'formal' one for the time being. regards. -- Kyotaro Horiguchi NTT Open Source Software Center -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers