Fix aboriginal mistake in lazy VACUUM's code for truncating away
authorTom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Sun, 16 Sep 2007 02:37:54 +0000 (02:37 +0000)
committerTom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Sun, 16 Sep 2007 02:37:54 +0000 (02:37 +0000)
commit3d446c476748a9e384e70bd09026cbdbd34a9bf2
tree88685d1af4692423880b71504b7eb4a14ca9466f
parent67bc5b0ca335cde3d1867135ed4997e0273c8595
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