Tom Lane wrote:
"Matthew T. O'Connor" <matthew@zeut.net> writes:
hmm.... the value in reltuples should be accurate after a vacuum (or vacuum analyze) if it's not it's a vacuum bug or something is going on that isn't understood. If you or pg_autovacuum are running plain analyze commands, that could explain the invalid reltules numbers.
Was reltuples = 113082 correct right after the vacuum?
Another thing to check is whether the reltuples (and relpages!) that
autovacuum is reporting are the same as what's actually in the pg_class
row for the relation. I'm wondering if this could be a similar issue
to the old autovac bug where it wasn't reading the value correctly.
I don't think so, as he did some manual selects from pg_class and pg_stat_all in one of the emails he sent that were showing similar numbers to what autovac was reporting.
If they are the same then it seems like it must be a backend issue.
One thing that is possibly relevant here is that in 8.0 a plain VACUUM
doesn't set reltuples to the exactly correct number, but to an
interpolated value that reflects our estimate of the "steady state"
average between vacuums. I wonder if that code is wrong, or if it's
operating as designed but is confusing autovac.
Ahh.... Now that you mention it, I do remember the discussion during 8.0 development. This sounds very much like the cause of the problem. Autovac is not vacuuming often enough for this table because reltuples is telling autovac that there are alot more tuples in this table than there really are.
Really this is just another case of the more general problem with autovac as it stands now. That is, you can't set vacuum thresholds on a per table basis, and databases like this can't survive with a one size fits all threshold. I would suggest that Otto perform regular cron based vacuums of this one table in addition to autovac, that is what several people I have heard from in the field are doing.
Come hell or high water I'm gonna get autovac integrated into 8.1, at which point per table thresholds would be easy todo.
Not as it stands now. That would be an interesting feature for debugging purposes though.Can autovac be told to run the vacuums in VERBOSE mode? It would be useful to compare what VERBOSE has to say to the changes in reltuples/relpages.
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