Re: First steps with 8.3 and autovacuum launcher

Simon Riggs wrote:
> On Fri, 2007-10-12 at 01:24 -0400, Alvaro Herrera wrote:
>> Yes, I think it is easy to mark the "is for xid wraparound" bit in the
>> WorkerInfo struct and have the cancel work only if it's off.
>>
>> However, what I think should happen is that the signal handler for
>> SIGINT in a worker for xid wraparound should not cancel the current
>> vacuum.  Instead turn it into a no-op, if possible.  That way we also
>> disallow a user from cancelling vacuums for xid wraparound.  I think he
>> can do that with pg_cancel_backend, and it could be dangerous.
> 
> I think that is dangerous too because the user may have specifically
> turned AV off. That anti-wraparound vacuum might spring up right in a
> busy period and start working its way through many tables, all of which
> cause massive writes to occur. That's about as close to us causing an
> outage as I ever want to see. We need a way through that to allow the
> user to realise his predicament and find a good time to VACUUM. I never
> want to say to anybody "nothing you can do, just sit and watch, your
> production system will be working again in no time. Restart? no that
> won't work either."

You are probably right that VACUUM going full-steam is a bad idea in most 
situations. Except for anti-wraparound vacuum, cancellation seems the most 
reasonable thing to do. Because autovacuum will usually pickup the table in 
time again.

The only problem I would see is if someone has an application that does a 
lot of schema changes (doesn't sound like a good idea anyway). In that case 
they would better issue manual vacuums on such tables.

Best Regards
Michael Paesold