Re: recovering from "found xmin ... from before relfrozenxid ..."

Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> writes:
> On Mon, Sep 21, 2020 at 2:21 PM Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
>> Right, but what we end up with is that the very same tuple xmin and
>> xmax might result in pruning/deletion, or not, depending on whether
>> it's part of a HOT chain or not.  That's at best pretty weird, and
>> at worst it means that corner-case bugs in other places are triggered
>> in only one of the two scenarios ... which is what we have here.

> I'm not sure I really understand how that's happening, because surely
> HOT chains and non-HOT chains are pruned by the same code, but it
> doesn't sound good.

No, they're not.  lazy_scan_heap() will never remove a tuple that
is HeapTupleIsHotUpdated or HeapTupleIsHeapOnly, even if it thinks
it's DEAD -- cf. vacuumlazy.c, about line 1350.  So tuples in
a HOT chain are deleted exactly when pruneheap.c sees fit to do so.
OTOH, for tuples not in a HOT chain, the decision is (I believe)
entirely on lazy_scan_heap().  And the core of my complaint is that
pruneheap.c's decisions about what is DEAD are not reliably identical
to what HeapTupleSatisfiesVacuum thinks.

I don't mind if a free-standing prune operation has its own rules,
but when it's invoked by VACUUM it ought to follow VACUUM's rules about
what is dead or alive.  What remains unclear at this point is whether
we ought to import some of the intelligence added by the GlobalVisState
patch into VACUUM's behavior, or just dumb down pruneheap.c so that
it applies exactly the HeapTupleSatisfiesVacuum rules when invoked
by VACUUM.

			regards, tom lane