Speed up rechecking if relation needs to be vacuumed or analyze in autovacuum.

After autovacuum collects the relations to vacuum or analyze, it rechecks
whether each relation still needs to be vacuumed or analyzed before actually
doing that. Previously this recheck could be a significant overhead
especially when there were a very large number of relations. This was
because each recheck forced the statistics to be refreshed, and the refresh
of the statistics for a very large number of relations could cause heavy
overhead. There was the report that this issue caused autovacuum workers
to have gotten “stuck” in a tight loop of table_recheck_autovac() that
rechecks whether a relation needs to be vacuumed or analyzed.

This commit speeds up the recheck by making autovacuum worker reuse
the previously-read statistics for the recheck if possible. Then if that
"stale" statistics says that a relation still needs to be vacuumed or analyzed,
autovacuum refreshes the statistics and does the recheck again.

The benchmark shows that the more relations exist and autovacuum workers
are running concurrently, the more this change reduces the autovacuum
execution time. For example, when there are 20,000 tables and 10 autovacuum
workers are running, the benchmark showed that the change improved
the performance of autovacuum more than three times. On the other hand,
even when there are only 1000 tables and only a single autovacuum worker
is running, the benchmark didn't show any big performance regression by
the change.

Firstly POC patch was proposed by Jim Nasby. As the result of discussion,
we used Tatsuhito Kasahara's version of the patch using the approach
suggested by Tom Lane.

Reported-by: Jim Nasby
Author: Tatsuhito Kasahara
Reviewed-by: Masahiko Sawada, Fujii Masao
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/3FC6C2F2-8A47-44C0-B997-28830B5716D0@amazon.com

src/backend/postmaster/autovacuum.c

@@ -328,6 +328,10 @@ static void FreeWorkerInfo(int code, Datum arg);
 static autovac_table *table_recheck_autovac(Oid relid, HTAB *table_toast_map,
 											TupleDesc pg_class_desc,
 											int effective_multixact_freeze_max_age);
+static void recheck_relation_needs_vacanalyze(Oid relid, AutoVacOpts *avopts,
+											  Form_pg_class classForm,
+											  int effective_multixact_freeze_max_age,
+											  bool *dovacuum, bool *doanalyze, bool *wraparound);
 static void relation_needs_vacanalyze(Oid relid, AutoVacOpts *relopts,
 									  Form_pg_class classForm,
 									  PgStat_StatTabEntry *tabentry,
@@ -2797,17 +2801,9 @@ table_recheck_autovac(Oid relid, HTAB *table_toast_map,
 	bool		dovacuum;
 	bool		doanalyze;
 	autovac_table *tab = NULL;
-	PgStat_StatTabEntry *tabentry;
-	PgStat_StatDBEntry *shared;
-	PgStat_StatDBEntry *dbentry;
 	bool		wraparound;
 	AutoVacOpts *avopts;
-
-	/* use fresh stats */
-	autovac_refresh_stats();
-
-	shared = pgstat_fetch_stat_dbentry(InvalidOid);
-	dbentry = pgstat_fetch_stat_dbentry(MyDatabaseId);
+	static bool reuse_stats = false;
 
 	/* fetch the relation's relcache entry */
 	classTup = SearchSysCacheCopy1(RELOID, ObjectIdGetDatum(relid));
@@ -2831,17 +2827,38 @@ table_recheck_autovac(Oid relid, HTAB *table_toast_map,
 			avopts = &hentry->ar_reloptions;
 	}
 
-	/* fetch the pgstat table entry */
-	tabentry = get_pgstat_tabentry_relid(relid, classForm->relisshared,
-										 shared, dbentry);
+	/*
+	 * Reuse the stats to recheck whether a relation needs to be vacuumed or
+	 * analyzed if it was reloaded before and has not been cleared yet. This
+	 * is necessary to avoid frequent refresh of stats, especially when there
+	 * are very large number of relations and the refresh can cause lots of
+	 * overhead.
+	 *
+	 * If we determined that a relation needs to be vacuumed or analyzed,
+	 * based on the old stats, we refresh stats and recheck the necessity
+	 * again. Because a relation may have already been vacuumed or analyzed by
+	 * someone since the last reload of stats.
+	 */
+	if (reuse_stats)
+	{
+		recheck_relation_needs_vacanalyze(relid, avopts, classForm,
+										  effective_multixact_freeze_max_age,
+										  &dovacuum, &doanalyze, &wraparound);
 
-	relation_needs_vacanalyze(relid, avopts, classForm, tabentry,
-							  effective_multixact_freeze_max_age,
-							  &dovacuum, &doanalyze, &wraparound);
+		/* Quick exit if a relation doesn't need to be vacuumed or analyzed */
+		if (!doanalyze && !dovacuum)
+		{
+			heap_freetuple(classTup);
+			return NULL;
+		}
+	}
 
-	/* ignore ANALYZE for toast tables */
-	if (classForm->relkind == RELKIND_TOASTVALUE)
-		doanalyze = false;
+	/* Use fresh stats and recheck again */
+	autovac_refresh_stats();
+
+	recheck_relation_needs_vacanalyze(relid, avopts, classForm,
+									  effective_multixact_freeze_max_age,
+									  &dovacuum, &doanalyze, &wraparound);
 
 	/* OK, it needs something done */
 	if (doanalyze || dovacuum)
@@ -2929,13 +2946,66 @@ table_recheck_autovac(Oid relid, HTAB *table_toast_map,
 		tab->at_dobalance =
 			!(avopts && (avopts->vacuum_cost_limit > 0 ||
 						 avopts->vacuum_cost_delay > 0));
+
+		/*
+		 * When we decide to do vacuum or analyze, the existing stats cannot
+		 * be reused in the next cycle because it's cleared at the end of
+		 * vacuum or analyze (by AtEOXact_PgStat()).
+		 */
+		reuse_stats = false;
+	}
+	else
+	{
+		/*
+		 * If neither vacuum nor analyze is necessary, the existing stats is
+		 * not cleared and can be reused in the next cycle.
+		 */
+		reuse_stats = true;
 	}
 
 	heap_freetuple(classTup);
-
 	return tab;
 }
 
+/*
+ * recheck_relation_needs_vacanalyze
+ *
+ * Subroutine for table_recheck_autovac.
+ *
+ * Fetch the pgstat of a relation and recheck whether a relation
+ * needs to be vacuumed or analyzed.
+ */
+static void
+recheck_relation_needs_vacanalyze(Oid relid,
+								  AutoVacOpts *avopts,
+								  Form_pg_class classForm,
+								  int effective_multixact_freeze_max_age,
+								  bool *dovacuum,
+								  bool *doanalyze,
+								  bool *wraparound)
+{
+	PgStat_StatTabEntry *tabentry;
+	PgStat_StatDBEntry *shared = NULL;
+	PgStat_StatDBEntry *dbentry = NULL;
+
+	if (classForm->relisshared)
+		shared = pgstat_fetch_stat_dbentry(InvalidOid);
+	else
+		dbentry = pgstat_fetch_stat_dbentry(MyDatabaseId);
+
+	/* fetch the pgstat table entry */
+	tabentry = get_pgstat_tabentry_relid(relid, classForm->relisshared,
+										 shared, dbentry);
+
+	relation_needs_vacanalyze(relid, avopts, classForm, tabentry,
+							  effective_multixact_freeze_max_age,
+							  dovacuum, doanalyze, wraparound);
+
+	/* ignore ANALYZE for toast tables */
+	if (classForm->relkind == RELKIND_TOASTVALUE)
+		*doanalyze = false;
+}
+
 /*
  * relation_needs_vacanalyze
  *