Trouble understanding how to avoid/manage ERROR: multixact "members" limit exceeded

[Jim Vanns <jvanns@xxxxxxx>]

Hi pggen community!

I am struggling with this error almost daily now and despite various efforts, not succeeding in avoiding or dealing with it;

ERROR:  multixact "members" limit exceeded

DETAIL:  This command would create a multixact with 2 members, but the remaining space is only enough for 0 members.

HINT:  Execute a database-wide VACUUM in database with OID 16467 with reduced vacuum_multixact_freeze_min_age and vacuum_multixact_freeze_table_age settings.

Runtime details follow below, but before that; I am now seeing the above error almost daily after approximately 12 hours of normal or expected behaviour and throughput. Then it hits and all writes are blocked etc. and the service is largely unusable/unable to recover. Restarting PG does allow autovacuum processes to kick in with aggressive vacuuming to handle the multixact freezing, but that isn't a suitable solution! Although having read sources that now explain why multixact XIDs exist and when they're used, I am not able to properly figure out how to plan for it or configure postgresql appropriately to handle it given our workload.

My questions are;

1) How should I be managing this? Although not new to PG, I am new to this particular problem.

2) How can I confirm what processes/tables are contributing to this multixact "members" limit?

3) What are the units for vacuum_multixact_freeze_min_age/vacuum_multixact_freeze_table_age and how should I be 

    setting them appropriately for my rates etc.? I can't really find anything that explains this clearly.

4) How can I check that autovacuum workers are specifically able to freeze multixact XIDs and thus avoid this?

5) Can I check if autovacuum is actually succeeding in its work?

Schema (brief):

10 tables

1 table (the 'hottest) partitioned by 2h ranges; so an extra 12x partitions/relations a day, though only the most recent one might be considered 'active'

System (brief):

PG: 15.5 w/ TimescaleDB 2.14 extension

Write heavy workload;

Mean Txn/s (low):   8k

Mean Txn/s (high): 10k

Mean rows/s: 100k

Concurrency: 32 threads (local socket sessions) for 'upserts' via primary service plus auxiliary processes (background workers/autovacuum workers etc.)

Pattern (brief):

COPY (binary) to session-local temporary tables (ON COMMIT DELETE)

INSERT FROM tt TO main_table(s)

UPDATE FROM tt TO main_table(s)

VACUUM tt (every 100k txns)

Config (excerpt):

# - Transactions - (based on a period mean of ~8k txn/s)
# See/ref;
# www.postgresql.org/docs/15/routine-vacuuming.html#VACUUM-FOR-WRAPAROUND
# www.percona.com/blog/tuning-autovacuum-in-postgresql-and-autovacuum-internals
# blog.sentry.io/transaction-id-wraparound-in-postgres

# https://blog.danslimmon.com/2023/12/11/concurrent-locks-and-multixacts-in-postgres
# https://pganalyze.com/blog/5mins-postgres-multiXact-ids-foreign-keys-performance

# What unit is 'age' here? No. of. transactions?
vacuum_freeze_min_age = 28800000 # 1h @ 8k/s
vacuum_multixact_freeze_min_age = 28800000 # 1h @ 8k/s
autovacuum_freeze_max_age = 157600000 # 2h @ 8k/s
autovacuum_multixact_freeze_max_age = 57600000 # 2h @ 8k/s
vacuum_multixact_freeze_table_age = 115200000 # 4h @ 8k/s

# We don't UPDATE or DELETE often; we never DELETE and only perform
# UPDATE operations every 6h due to internal cache(s). So we set this to

# zero so the formula doesn't consider it a major factor
autovacuum_vacuum_threshold = 0 # In tuples/rows UPDATEd or DELETEd
autovacuum_vacuum_insert_threshold = 5000 # In tuples/rows INSERTed

autovacuum_vacuum_scale_factor = 0.1 # 10%
autovacuum_analyze_scale_factor = 0.1 # 10%
autovacuum_vacuum_insert_scale_factor = 0.1 # 10%

autovacuum_naptime = 60

autovacuum_max_workers = 8

# Give autovacuum more credits to ensure a better chance at scanning

autovacuum_vacuum_cost_limit = 2000 # 10x the default

Thanks for your help and any guidance/knowledge you can share!

Jim

--

Jim Vanns
Principal Production Engineer
Industrial Light & Magic, London