Waiting for 8.4 – new FSM (Free Space Map)

On 30th of September, Heikki Linnakangas committed his patch that changes FSM:

Rewrite the FSM. Instead of relying on a fixed-size shared memory segment, the
free space information is stored in a dedicated FSM relation fork, with each
relation (except for hash indexes; they don't use FSM).
 
This eliminates the max_fsm_relations and max_fsm_pages GUC options; remove any
trace of them from the backend, initdb, and documentation.
 
Rewrite contrib/pg_freespacemap to match the new FSM implementation. Also
introduce a new variant of the get_raw_page(regclass, int4, int4) function in
contrib/pageinspect that let's you to return pages from any relation fork, and
a new fsm_page_contents() function to inspect the new FSM pages.

Continue reading Waiting for 8.4 – new FSM (Free Space Map)