Updating: I found two other sessions running the same query. Once I killed them the pg_tmp files were automatically deleted.
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This morning we found out that our filesystem was at 98% and filling quickly. We immediately found one query running for a long time and saw 1500+ files in the pgsql_tmp directory we could attribute to it.
I killed using pg_terminate_backend and some space was reclaimed, but the temporary files from the process are still in the pgsql_tmp directory.
We're on postgres 8.4.9 on centos. Which process should be deleting these files and what is normally the delay? I'm assuming the postmaster process will eventually delete them, but does the server have to be bounced in order for this to happen? It's been 30 minutes since the process was killed.
Also, is there some method of governing the temporary space used? Our temp_tablespace parameter is null.
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