Add a few entries to the tail of time mapping, to see old values.

Kevin Grittner <kgrittn@postgresql.org>

Commit: 7c3e8039f450eb99b3a73272d0a1661195747d1b
Author: Kevin Grittner <kgrittn@postgresql.org>
Date: 2016-04-29T21:46:08Z
Releases: 9.6.0
Add a few entries to the tail of time mapping, to see old values.

Without a few entries beyond old_snapshot_threshold, the lookup
would often fail, resulting in the more aggressive pruning or
vacuum being skipped often enough to matter.  This was very clearly
shown by a python test script posted by Ants Aasma, and was likely
a factor in an earlier but somewhat less clear-cut test case posted
by Jeff Janes.

This patch makes no change to the logic, per se -- it just makes
the array of mapping entries big enough to make lookup misses based
on timing much less likely.  An occasional miss is still possible
if a thread stalls for more than 10 minutes, but that does not
create any problem with correctness of behavior.  Besides, if
things are so busy that a thread is stalling for more than 10
minutes, it is probably OK to skip the more aggressive cleanup at
that particular point in time.

Files

PathChange+/−
src/backend/utils/time/snapmgr.c modified +13 −13
src/include/utils/snapmgr.h modified +13 −0