Re: POC: Parallel processing of indexes in autovacuum

Daniil Davydov <3danissimo@gmail.com>

From: Daniil Davydov <3danissimo@gmail.com>
To: SATYANARAYANA NARLAPURAM <satyanarlapuram@gmail.com>
Cc: Bharath Rupireddy <bharath.rupireddyforpostgres@gmail.com>, Masahiko Sawada <sawada.mshk@gmail.com>, Sami Imseih <samimseih@gmail.com>, Alexander Korotkov <aekorotkov@gmail.com>, Matheus Alcantara <matheusssilv97@gmail.com>, Maxim Orlov <orlovmg@gmail.com>, Postgres hackers <pgsql-hackers@lists.postgresql.org>
Date: 2026-03-31T13:26:29Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
Hi,

On Tue, Mar 31, 2026 at 2:46 PM SATYANARAYANA NARLAPURAM
<satyanarlapuram@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Mar 30, 2026 at 1:44 AM Daniil Davydov <3danissimo@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Actually, autovacuum_max_parallel_workers is already limited by
>> max_parallel_workers. It is not clear for me why we allow setting this GUC
>> higher than max_parallel_workers, but if this happens, I think it is a user's
>> misconfiguration.
>
> Isn’t there a wasted effort here if user misconfigures because anyway we cannot launch that many workers? I suggest making a check here.

We have a pretty long discussion about this in the above messages. I also
think that the user have too many ways to misconfigure postgres. But we
don't consider such misconfiguration as our fault.

>> Parallel a/v workers inherit cost based parameters (including the
>> vacuum_cost_limit) from the leader worker. Do you mean that this can be too
>> low value for parallel operation? If so, user can manually increase the
>> vacuum_cost_limit reloption for those tables, where parallel a/v sleeps too
>> much (due to cost delay).
>
>
> They don’t inherit but share, isn’t it?
>

Yeah, let me clarify. At the beginning of parallel a/v, the leader a/v worker
creates and initializes a shared structure, where its cost based parameters
are stored. Then, all parallel workers will read them from shmem and update
their parameters accordingly.

--
Best regards,
Daniil Davydov



Commits

Same data as JSON: GET /api/v1/messages/:b64id/commits the thread's linked commits as JSON, with link sources. API reference →
  1. Allow autovacuum to use parallel vacuum workers.

  2. Add parallel vacuum worker usage to VACUUM (VERBOSE) and autovacuum logs.

  3. doc: Put new options in consistent order on man pages