Fix aboriginal mistake in lazy VACUUM's code for truncating away
authorTom Lane <[email protected]>
Sun, 16 Sep 2007 02:38:25 +0000 (02:38 +0000)
committerTom Lane <[email protected]>
Sun, 16 Sep 2007 02:38:25 +0000 (02:38 +0000)
commit7914a628e64032749e6f0c645fd6b803815569a0
tree5d8392912a3edaf118fe991747f74dc253a4aaed
parent37bfd59d1f20d6acae7b12f55ac85dd79299cd8c
Fix aboriginal mistake in lazy VACUUM's code for truncating away
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.
src/backend/commands/vacuumlazy.c