[anarazel]

> I don't see ever going away from using vacuum to maintain the visibility map

I don't think that's that unlikely to change. There's two major avenues: Write it during hot-pruning (which is done on page accesses), and perform a "lower impact" vacuum on insert-only tables more regularly

> but hopefully the changes in 9.6 will make it a non-issue on large tables.

You mean the freeze map? That doesn't really change the picture for regular vacuums, it changes how bad anti-wraparound vacuums are. The impact of the table vacuum itself is most of the time not that bad these days (due to the visibility map), what's annoying is usually the corresponding index scans. They have to scan the whole index, which is quite expensive.