Re: Postmaster holding unlinked files for pg_largeobject table

Excerpts from Alexander Shulgin's message of vie jun 03 17:45:28 -0400 2011:

> There were about 450 such (or similar) files, all of them having /2613 in the filename. Since 2613 is a regclass of pg_largeobject and we are indeed working with quite a few large objects in that DB so this is where our problem lies we suspect.
>
> Restarting PostgreSQL obviously helps the issue and the disk space occupied by those unlinked files (about 63GB actually) is reclaimed.
>
> So what happens on that host is that we drop/restore a fresh version of the DB from the production host, followed by a migration script which among other things loads around 16GB of data files as large objects. This happens nightly.

What surprises me is that the open references remain after a database
drop. Surely this means that no backends keep open file descriptors to
any table in that database, because there are no connections.

I also requested Alexander to run a checkpoint and see if that made the
FDs go away (on the theory that bgwriter could be the culprit) -- no dice.

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Álvaro Herrera <alvherre(at)commandprompt(dot)com>
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