"Christopher Kings-Lynne" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > I was running a long-running vacuum full, and then halfway thru that our > background vacuum process started. As well as this, there was light > activity on a users table from which vacuum full was removing 90000 rows.
There would be *zero* activity on a table undergoing vacuum full, unless your app has found a way around vacuum full's exclusive lock. You sure this wasn't a plain vacuum? > Then vacuum full failed after a while: > ERROR: simple_heap_update: tuple concurrently updated Were you doing VACUUM ANALYZEs? It's possible for two concurrent VACUUM ANALYZEs of the same table to get this failure from trying to concurrently update the same row in pg_statistic. (The cure for this seems worse than the disease: AFAICS you'd have to prevent *all* concurrent updates of pg_statistic by grabbing a table-level lock. So we just live with one of the analyzes reporting a failure. All the useful work gets done anyway, by one transaction or the other.) regards, tom lane ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 5: Have you checked our extensive FAQ? http://www.postgresql.org/docs/faqs/FAQ.html