• Alvaro Herrera's avatar
    Have multixact be truncated by checkpoint, not vacuum · f741300c
    Alvaro Herrera authored
    Instead of truncating pg_multixact at vacuum time, do it only at
    checkpoint time.  The reason for doing it this way is twofold: first, we
    want it to delete only segments that we're certain will not be required
    if there's a crash immediately after the removal; and second, we want to
    do it relatively often so that older files are not left behind if
    there's an untimely crash.
    
    Per my proposal in
    http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/20140626044519.GJ7340@eldon.alvh.no-ip.org
    we now execute the truncation in the checkpointer process rather than as
    part of vacuum.  Vacuum is in only charge of maintaining in shared
    memory the value to which it's possible to truncate the files; that
    value is stored as part of checkpoints also, and so upon recovery we can
    reuse the same value to re-execute truncate and reset the
    oldest-value-still-safe-to-use to one known to remain after truncation.
    
    Per bug reported by Jeff Janes in the course of his tests involving
    bug #8673.
    
    While at it, update some comments that hadn't been updated since
    multixacts were changed.
    
    Backpatch to 9.3, where persistency of pg_multixact files was
    introduced by commit 0ac5ad51.
    f741300c
multixact.c 89.6 KB