Re: When Update balloons memory

On Tue, Dec 14, 2021 at 3:28 PM Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> Uh ... it seems that you are writing as though "giving the hint"
> means saying that the column value changed.  That seems quite
> confusingly backwards to me, as that is/ought to be the expected
> assumption.

That's not what I meant. When I say "give the hint", I mean pass
"indexUnchanged = true" to aminsert(). This is interpreted within
btinsert() as "the incoming index tuple is a duplicate of at least one
index, so perform a bottom-up index deletion pass if and when the
alternative is splitting the leaf page". In practice the hint always
has to be treated as a noisy signal about what might work, as a
strategy of last resort, with costs that are imposed on non-HOT
updaters.

-- 
Peter Geoghegan