On an overnight test run, I ran into an unexpected "out of space" condition.
The writer process was holding on to dozens of file descriptors for long-ago deleted files from dropped tables and indexes, preventing their disk space from being freed for reuse. I think the checkpoint writer process learns about deleted files from the "absorb fsync" mechanism and promptly closes those handles. But since the bgwriter process was split from the checkpoint writer, the bgwriter no longer benefits from this mechanism. It looks like it hold the file handles until either is it is killed and restarted, or until they get flushed out of vfd cache (which holds ~1000 files on my machine, so that can be a long time and lot of disk space). I don't know if this is a bug exactly, but it seems pretty unfortunate. Cheers, Jeff -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
