Back-patch contrib/vacuumlo's new -l (limit) option into 9.0 and 9.1.

Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>

Commit: 3bf25a2a16ca6efefa97f058da062b6c5933ebe1
Author: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Date: 2012-03-21T17:05:05Z
Releases: 9.0.8
Back-patch contrib/vacuumlo's new -l (limit) option into 9.0 and 9.1.

Since 9.0, removing lots of large objects in a single transaction risks
exceeding max_locks_per_transaction, because we merged large object removal
into the generic object-drop mechanism, which takes out an exclusive lock
on each object to be dropped.  This creates a hazard for contrib/vacuumlo,
which has historically tried to drop all unreferenced large objects in one
transaction.  There doesn't seem to be any correctness requirement to do it
that way, though; we only need to drop enough large objects per transaction
to amortize the commit costs.

To prevent a regression from pre-9.0 releases wherein vacuumlo worked just
fine, back-patch commits b69f2e36402aaa222ed03c1769b3de6d5be5f302 and
64c604898e812aa93c124c666e8709fff1b8dd26, which break vacuumlo's deletions
into multiple transactions with a user-controllable upper limit on the
number of objects dropped per transaction.

Tim Lewis, Robert Haas, Tom Lane

Files

PathChange+/−
contrib/vacuumlo/vacuumlo.c modified +116 −29
doc/src/sgml/vacuumlo.sgml modified +19 −5