Subject: "Disadvantages of increasing autovacuum_freeze_max_age" paragraph to be modified

From: PG Doc comments form <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 12 Feb 2026 11:48:11 +0000

The following documentation comment has been logged on the website:

Page: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/18/routine-vacuuming.html
Description:

Hello

The current doc says (Routine Vacuuming for all available versions) :

"The sole disadvantage of increasing autovacuum_freeze_max_age (and
vacuum_freeze_table_age along with it) is that the pg_xact and pg_commit_ts
subdirectories of the database cluster will take more space, because it must
store the commit status and (if track_commit_timestamp is enabled) timestamp
of all transactions back to the autovacuum_freeze_max_age horizon. The
commit status uses two bits per transaction, so if autovacuum_freeze_max_age
is set to its maximum allowed value of two billion, pg_xact can be expected
to grow to about half a gigabyte and pg_commit_ts to about 20GB. If this is
trivial compared to your total database size, setting
autovacuum_freeze_max_age to its maximum allowed value is recommended.
Otherwise, set it depending on what you are willing to allow for pg_xact and
pg_commit_ts storage. (The default, 200 million transactions, translates to
about 50MB of pg_xact storage and about 2GB of pg_commit_ts storage.)"

Based on my experience, the growing size of pg_xact and pg_commit_ts
subdirectories is not the "sole" disadvantage of increasing
autovacuum_freeze_max_age. The higher the value is, the later autovacuum
will be triggered to prevent wraparound. Autovacuum launches workers to do
the work primarily for 2 reasons : 1. If the no. for dead tuples is greater
than the calculated threshold, and 2. If the no. of txids consumed by the
database cluster have reached/surpassed autovacuum_freeze_max_age. If we
increase the autovacuum_freeze_max_age to 2 billion (as recommended above),
to trigger on the second condition autovacuum might be too late already.
This is a more important point in my opinion than the one in the docs.

My suggestion would be :
1. To not recommend setting  autovacuum_freeze_max_age to 2 billion, as it
contradicts with the paragraph already mentioned in the docs :
"The maximum time that a table can go unvacuumed is two billion transactions
minus the vacuum_freeze_min_age value at the time of the last aggressive
vacuum. If it were to go unvacuumed for longer than that, data loss could
result. To ensure that this does not happen, autovacuum is invoked on any
table that might contain unfrozen rows with XIDs older than the age
specified by the configuration parameter autovacuum_freeze_max_age. (This
will happen even if autovacuum is disabled.)"

2. Remove the word "sole", as its not true (already explained above why).

If my understanding is flawed, I would love to hear your feedback.

Thanks and Regards
Divya Sharma

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From: Lukas Fittl <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 12 Feb 2026 12:21:45 -0800

> This is a more important point in my opinion than the one in the docs.

I would agree with this understanding. I don't understand why this is
worded the way it is today, it seems like bad guidance.

To capture as I understand it: One should not set
autovacuum_freeze_max_age to two billion because that would
effectively make one dependent on the (now luckily existing) failsafe
vacuums, instead of doing anti-wraparound vacuums.

Looking back at the history, I think this was first worded that way in
48188e1621bb, almost 20 years ago, and whilst the text has changed
over the years, the intent seems to come from back then.

Adding Tom and Heikki since they were involved in that commit back
then, and may recall why the wording was changed that way?

> 2. Remove the word "sole", as its not true (already explained above why).

+1 to both points.

Thanks,
Lukas

--
Lukas Fittl