Remove size limitations of vacuums dead_tuples array
When dealing with a case where a 2TB table had 3 billion dead tuples I
discovered that vacuum currently can't make use of more than 1GB of
maintenance_work_mem - 179M tuples. This caused excessive amounts of index
scanning even though there was plenty of memory available.
I didn't see any good reason for having this limit, so here is a patch that
makes use of MemoryContextAllocHuge, and converts the array indexing to use
size_t to lift a second limit at 12GB.
One potential problem with allowing larger arrays is that bsearch might no
longer be the best way of determining if a ctid was marked dead. It might
pay off to convert the dead tuples array to a hash table to avoid O(n log
n) runtime when scanning indexes. I haven't done any profiling yet to see
how big of a problem this is.
Second issue I noticed is that the dead_tuples array is always allocated
max allowed size, unless the table can't possibly have that many tuples. It
may make sense to allocate it based on estimated number of dead tuples and
resize if needed.
Regards,
Ants Aasma
Web: https://www.cybertec-postgresql.com
Attachments:
0001-Allow-vacuum-to-use-more-than-1GB-of-memory.patchtext/x-patch; charset=US-ASCII; name=0001-Allow-vacuum-to-use-more-than-1GB-of-memory.patchDownload+16-19
On Wed, Oct 09, 2019 at 03:58:11PM +0300, Ants Aasma wrote:
When dealing with a case where a 2TB table had 3 billion dead tuples I
discovered that vacuum currently can't make use of more than 1GB of
maintenance_work_mem - 179M tuples. This caused excessive amounts of index
scanning even though there was plenty of memory available.I didn't see any good reason for having this limit, so here is a patch that
makes use of MemoryContextAllocHuge, and converts the array indexing to use
size_t to lift a second limit at 12GB.One potential problem with allowing larger arrays is that bsearch might no
longer be the best way of determining if a ctid was marked dead. It might
pay off to convert the dead tuples array to a hash table to avoid O(n log
n) runtime when scanning indexes. I haven't done any profiling yet to see
how big of a problem this is.Second issue I noticed is that the dead_tuples array is always allocated
max allowed size, unless the table can't possibly have that many tuples. It
may make sense to allocate it based on estimated number of dead tuples and
resize if needed.
There already was a attempt to make this improvement, see [1]/messages/by-id/CAGTBQpbDCaR6vv9=scXzuT8fSbckf=a3NgZdWFWZbdVugVht6Q@mail.gmail.com. There was
a fairly long discussion about how to best do that (using other data
structure, not just a simple array). It kinda died about a year ago, but
I suppose there's a lot of relevant info in that thread.
[1]: /messages/by-id/CAGTBQpbDCaR6vv9=scXzuT8fSbckf=a3NgZdWFWZbdVugVht6Q@mail.gmail.com
--
Tomas Vondra http://www.2ndQuadrant.com
PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Remote DBA, Training & Services
On Thu, 10 Oct 2019 at 17:05, Tomas Vondra <tomas.vondra@2ndquadrant.com>
wrote:
There already was a attempt to make this improvement, see [1]. There was
a fairly long discussion about how to best do that (using other data
structure, not just a simple array). It kinda died about a year ago, but
I suppose there's a lot of relevant info in that thread.[1]
/messages/by-id/CAGTBQpbDCaR6vv9=scXzuT8fSbckf=a3NgZdWFWZbdVugVht6Q@mail.gmail.com
Thanks for the pointer, wow that's a long thread. For some reason it did
not consider lifting the INT_MAX tuples/12GB limitation. I'll see if I can
pick up where that thread left off and push it along.
Regards,
Ants Aasma
Web: https://www.cybertec-postgresql.com
On Fri, Oct 11, 2019 at 04:49:11PM +0300, Ants Aasma wrote:
Thanks for the pointer, wow that's a long thread. For some reason it did
not consider lifting the INT_MAX tuples/12GB limitation. I'll see if I can
pick up where that thread left off and push it along.
Hmm. Okay.. Then I have marked this entry as returned with feedback
in this CF.
--
Michael