tuples per page instead of fixed 200, to better cope with systems that use a
different block size.

table, by allocating just enough for a hardcoded number of dead tuples per
page.  The current estimate is 200 dead tuples per page.

Per reports from Jeff Amiel, Erik Jones and Marko Kreen, and subsequent
discussion.
CVS: ----------------------------------------------------------------------
CVS: Enter Log.  Lines beginning with `CVS:' are removed automatically
CVS:
CVS: Committing in .
CVS:
CVS: Modified Files:
CVS: 	commands/vacuumlazy.c
CVS: ----------------------------------------------------------------------

* stats_start_collector goes away; we always start the collector process,
unless prevented by a problem with setting up the stats UDP socket.

* stats_reset_on_server_start goes away; it seems useless in view of the
availability of pg_stat_reset().

* stats_block_level and stats_row_level are merged into a single variable
"track_counts", which controls all reports sent to the collector process.

* stats_command_string is renamed to track_activities.

* log_autovacuum is renamed to log_autovacuum_min_duration to better reflect
its meaning.

The log_autovacuum change is not a compatibility issue since it didn't exist
before 8.3 anyway.  The other changes need to be release-noted.

truncates a table.  Introduces race condition, as shown by buildfarm
failures.

columns, and the new version can be stored on the same heap page, we no longer
generate extra index entries for the new version.  Instead, index searches
follow the HOT-chain links to ensure they find the correct tuple version.

In addition, this patch introduces the ability to "prune" dead tuples on a
per-page basis, without having to do a complete VACUUM pass to recover space.
VACUUM is still needed to clean up dead index entries, however.

Pavan Deolasee, with help from a bunch of other people.

no-longer-needed pages at the end of a table.  We thought we could throw away
pages containing HEAPTUPLE_DEAD tuples; but this is not so, because such
tuples very likely have index entries pointing at them, and we wouldn't have
removed the index entries.  The problem only emerges in a somewhat unlikely
race condition: the dead tuples have to have been inserted by a transaction
that later aborted, and this has to have happened between VACUUM's initial
scan of the page and then rechecking it for empty in count_nondeletable_pages.
But that timespan will include an index-cleaning pass, so it's not all that
hard to hit.  This seems to explain a couple of previously unsolved bug
reports.

than two independent bits (one of which was never used in heap pages anyway,
or at least hadn't been in a very long time).  This gives us flexibility to
add the HOT notions of redirected and dead item pointers without requiring
anything so klugy as magic values of lp_off and lp_len.  The state values
are chosen so that for the states currently in use (pre-HOT) there is no
change in the physical representation.

was removed.

vacuum, instead of waiting till commit.

an exclusive lock on the table at this point, which we want to release as soon
as possible.  This is called in the phase of lazy vacuum where we truncate the
empty pages at the end of the table.

An alternative solution would be to lower the vacuum delay settings before
starting the truncating phase, but this doesn't work very well in autovacuum
due to the autobalancing code (which can cause other processes to change our
cost delay settings).  This case could be considered in the balancing code, but
it is simpler this way.

rows will normally never obtain an XID at all.  We already did things this way
for subtransactions, but this patch extends the concept to top-level
transactions.  In applications where there are lots of short read-only
transactions, this should improve performance noticeably; not so much from
removal of the actual XID-assignments, as from reduction of overhead that's
driven by the rate of XID consumption.  We add a concept of a "virtual
transaction ID" so that active transactions can be uniquely identified even
if they don't have a regular XID.  This is a much lighter-weight concept:
uniqueness of VXIDs is only guaranteed over the short term, and no on-disk
record is made about them.

Florian Pflug, with some editorialization by Tom.

buffers, rather than blowing out the whole shared-buffer arena.  Aside from
avoiding cache spoliation, this fixes the problem that VACUUM formerly tended
to cause a WAL flush for every page it modified, because we had it hacked to
use only a single buffer.  Those flushes will now occur only once per
ring-ful.  The exact ring size, and the threshold for seqscans to switch into
the ring usage pattern, remain under debate; but the infrastructure seems
done.  The key bit of infrastructure is a new optional BufferAccessStrategy
object that can be passed to ReadBuffer operations; this replaces the former
StrategyHintVacuum API.

This patch also changes the buffer usage-count methodology a bit: we now
advance usage_count when first pinning a buffer, rather than when last
unpinning it.  To preserve the behavior that a buffer's lifetime starts to
decrease when it's released, the clock sweep code is modified to not decrement
usage_count of pinned buffers.

Work not done in this commit: teach GiST and GIN indexes to use the vacuum
BufferAccessStrategy for vacuum-driven fetches.

Original patch by Simon, reworked by Heikki and again by Tom.

to avoid losing useful Xid information in not-so-old tuples.  This makes
CLUSTER behave the same as VACUUM as far a tuple-freezing behavior goes
(though CLUSTER does not yet advance the table's relfrozenxid).

While at it, move the actual freezing operation in rewriteheap.c to a more
appropriate place, and document it thoroughly.  This part of the patch from
Tom Lane.

messages to the stats collector.  This avoids the problem that enabling
stats_row_level for autovacuum has a significant overhead for short
read-only transactions, as noted by Arjen van der Meijden.  We can avoid
an extra gettimeofday call by piggybacking on the one done for WAL-logging
xact commit or abort (although that doesn't help read-only transactions,
since they don't WAL-log anything).

In my proposal for this, I noted that we could change the WAL log entries
for commit/abort to record full TimestampTz precision, instead of only
time_t as at present.  That's not done in this patch, but will be committed
separately.

Riggs, additional code and docs by me.  Per discussion.

function might reduce the number of free pages in the table.  Recommend
VACUUM FULL only if 20% free.

Simon Riggs.

  errhint("Consider using VACUUM FULL on this relation or increasing the configuration parameter \"max_fsm_pages\".")));

back-stamped for this.

in PITR scenarios.  We now WAL-log the replacement of old XIDs with
FrozenTransactionId, so that such replacement is guaranteed to propagate to
PITR slave databases.  Also, rather than relying on hint-bit updates to be
preserved, pg_clog is not truncated until all instances of an XID are known to
have been replaced by FrozenTransactionId.  Add new GUC variables and
pg_autovacuum columns to allow management of the freezing policy, so that
users can trade off the size of pg_clog against the amount of freezing work
done.  Revise the already-existing code that forces autovacuum of tables
approaching the wraparound point to make it more bulletproof; also, revise the
autovacuum logic so that anti-wraparound vacuuming is done per-table rather
than per-database.  initdb forced because of changes in pg_class, pg_database,
and pg_autovacuum catalogs.  Heikki Linnakangas, Simon Riggs, and Tom Lane.

even when a single relation requires more than max_fsm_pages pages.  Also,
make VACUUM emit a warning in this case, since it likely means that VACUUM
FULL or other drastic corrective measure is needed.  Per reports from Jeff
Frost and others of unexpected changes in the claimed max_fsm_pages need.

table: avoid invoking LockBufferForCleanup without need, put out the
same log message we would have before, minor code beautification.

second scan of table).

Gregory Stark

(table or index) before trying to open its relcache entry.  This fixes
race conditions in which someone else commits a change to the relation's
catalog entries while we are in process of doing relcache load.  Problems
of that ilk have been reported sporadically for years, but it was not
really practical to fix until recently --- for instance, the recent
addition of WAL-log support for in-place updates helped.

Along the way, remove pg_am.amconcurrent: all AMs are now expected to support
concurrent update.

Strip unused include files out unused include files, and add needed
includes to C files.

The next step is to remove unused include files in C files.

To this end, add a couple of columns to pg_class, relminxid and relvacuumxid,
based on which we calculate the pg_database columns after each vacuum.

We now force all databases to be vacuumed, even template ones.  A backend
noticing too old a database (meaning pg_database.datminxid is in danger of
falling behind Xid wraparound) will signal the postmaster, which in turn will
start an autovacuum iteration to process the offending database.  In principle
this is only there to cope with frozen (non-connectable) databases without
forcing users to set them to connectable, but it could force regular user
database to go through a database-wide vacuum at any time.  Maybe we should
warn users about this somehow.  Of course the real solution will be to use
autovacuum all the time ;-)

There are some additional improvements we could have in this area: for example
the vacuum code could be smarter about not updating pg_database for each table
when called by autovacuum, and do it only once the whole autovacuum iteration
is done.

I updated the system catalogs documentation, but I didn't modify the
maintenance section.  Also having some regression tests for this would be nice
but it's not really a very straightforward thing to do.

Catalog version bumped due to system catalog changes.

discussion (including making def_arg allow reserved words), add missed
opt_definition for UNIQUE case.  Put the reloptions support code in a less
random place (I chose to make a new file access/common/reloptions.c).
Eliminate header inclusion creep.  Make the index options functions safely
user-callable (seems like client apps might like to be able to test validity
of options before trying to make an index).  Reduce overhead for normal case
with no options by allowing rd_options to be NULL.  Fix some unmaintainably
klugy code, including getting rid of Natts_pg_class_fixed at long last.
Some stylistic cleanup too, and pay attention to keeping comments in sync
with code.

Documentation still needs work, though I did fix the omissions in
catalogs.sgml and indexam.sgml.

ITAGAKI Takahiro

This formulation requires every AM to provide amvacuumcleanup, unlike before,
but it's surely a whole lot cleaner.  Also, add an 'amstorage' column to
pg_am so that we can get rid of hardwired knowledge in DefineOpClass().

misleadingly-named WriteBuffer routine, and instead require routines that
change buffer pages to call MarkBufferDirty (which does exactly what it says).
We also require that they do so before calling XLogInsert; this takes care of
the synchronization requirement documented in SyncOneBuffer.  Note that
because bufmgr takes the buffer content lock (in shared mode) while writing
out any buffer, it doesn't matter whether MarkBufferDirty is executed before
the buffer content change is complete, so long as the content change is
completed before releasing exclusive lock on the buffer.  So it's OK to set
the dirtybit before we fill in the LSN.
This eliminates the former kluge of needing to set the dirtybit in LockBuffer.
Aside from making the code more transparent, we can also add some new
debugging assertions, in particular that the caller of MarkBufferDirty must
hold the buffer content lock, not merely a pin.

per report from Stefan Kaltenbrunner.

partial.  None of the existing AMs do anything useful except counting
tuples when there's nothing to delete, and we can get a tuple count
from the heap as long as it's not a partial index.  (hash actually can
skip anyway because it maintains a tuple count in the index metapage.)
GIST is not currently able to exploit this optimization because, due to
failure to index NULLs, GIST is always effectively partial.  Possibly
we should fix that sometime.
Simon Riggs w/ some review by Tom Lane.

> Allow VACUUM to complete faster by avoiding scanning the indexes when no
> rows were removed from the heap by the VACUUM.

rows were removed from the heap by the VACUUM.

Simon Riggs

comment line where output as too long, and update typedefs for /lib
directory.  Also fix case where identifiers were used as variable names
in the backend, but as typedefs in ecpg (favor the backend for
indenting).

Backpatch to 8.1.X.

the convenience of tuptoaster.c and is no longer needed, so may as well
get rid of some small amount of overhead.