This article was written before SKIP LOCKED was introduced

[guettli]

No description provided.

[brandur]

The issue described in the article is more subtle than that. The dead rows that caused the performance issues aren't locked by any other open transactions — they're just pure dead, but kept around the system because there is a transaction in the system that's very old. It doesn't even have to be locking any of the job rows in the question, but still blocks VACUUM on those rows just in case it might want to look at them.

SKIP LOCKED will help in some queue-type situations, and libraries like Que have gone on to implement more sophisticated locking strategies that are less prone to degrade in case of bloat, but the core problem described in the article is still present in Postgres.