pg_autovacuum misinterpreting reltuples?

Jeff Boes <jboes@nexcerpt.com>

From: Jeff Boes <jboes@nexcerpt.com>
To: PostgreSQL-development <pgsql-hackers@postgreSQL.org>
Date: 2004-04-30T13:45:21Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
We noticed that one of our high-volume insert tables was being vacuumed 
every time pg_autovacuum woke up. (I"m running it with the default 
threshold values, and a 900-second sleep cycle.) The table has a few 
million rows in it. With "debug = 2" on, here's what the pg_autovacuum 
log reports for this table:

 [2004-04-30 09:32:11 AM]   table name:     nexcerpt."public"."links"
 [2004-04-30 09:32:11 AM]      relid: 1014188;   relisshared: 0
 [2004-04-30 09:32:11 AM]      reltuples: 3;  relpages: 118888

Note that "reltuples" is being reported as "3", which seems a bit low. Aha!

# select reltuples from pg_class where relname = 'links';
  reltuples
-------------
 3.32127e+06
(1 row)

Is it possible that pg_autovacuum sees this value as "3"? Or is it just 
mis-formatting the value in the log?

-- 
Jeff Boes                                      vox 269.226.9550 ext 24
Database Engineer                                     fax 269.349.9076
Nexcerpt, Inc.                                 http://www.nexcerpt.com
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