On Fri, 21 Nov 2025 at 07:36, Robert Haas <[email protected]> wrote: > If you want to take more manual control, you can use > the reloption, a choice that you can layer on top of the default > strategy or any of the alternate strategies just proposed. Of course, > making this all too complicated is a recipe for failure, but I suspect > that making it at least somewhat configurable is a good idea.
But it is configurable... you're free to change any of autovacuum_freeze_max_age, autovacuum_multixact_freeze_max_age, autovacuum_vacuum_scale_factor, autovacuum_vacuum_insert_scale_factor and autovacuum_analyze_scale_factor, plus all the other autovacuum_vacuum*_threshold GUCs and relptions to adjust the score. The design is no accident. Of course, that does also affect the eligibility for the table to be vacuumed, not just the order, but it's not like there's no way for users to influence the order. If we really do discover that pg_catalog tables need vacuum attention sooner, then maybe we should consider defaulting a reloption for that, or maybe there's only a subset of pg_catalog tables that that matters for. For the record, I don't deny that it is possible that there is some scenario where the pg_class order is better than sorting by the percentage-over-threshold method, but IMO, it seems quite extreme to go adding a series of new reloptions to weight the scores based on no evidence that there's an actual problem or that it's even a good solution to fixing some currently unknown problem. If we later discover there is no issue, then reloptions are quite painful to remove due to pg_dump (or rather failed restores). I think the vacuum options are complex enough without risking adding a few new ones that we don't even know are required or are even useful to anyone. As for the GUC, I think we should at least commit the patch first and add an open item to "Decisions to Recheck Mid-Beta" for v19 to see if anyone still thinks a GUC is a good escape hatch, or if we'd prefer to revert the patch because it's causing trouble. As I see it, we've got about 6 months or maybe a bit more of testing how well this works before we need to make a decision. My vote is to use as much of that time as possible rather than using it to allow people to dream up hypothetical problems that might or might not exist. David
