Vincent de Phily <vincent.dephily@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > I have droped a database a few hours ago to reclaim some badly-needed space, > but that disk space has not been freed yet. Investigating further, there are > lots of deleted but open files that seem to correspond to the droped db, all > open by some postgres process. > > A lot of process were db connections to databases other than the droped one > (I'm not using connection pooling). The other process is the autovacuum > launcher. I have reset the various connection processes, but I hesitate to > kill the autovacuum process. > > I'm not sure wether that's relevant, but I moved the database to another > > server using slony1-2.2.2 before droping it on the old server. There were > already no more slon processes running when I droped the db. > > > 1) why does this happen at all (keeping files from a droped databse open, even > by processes that never connected to that specific db) ? > > 2) Can the autovacuum launcher process be safely killed (there are no long- > running vacuum queries) ? > > 3) Is there a generally cleaner way to do all this ? I suspect that the other backends needed to flush a page from cache to free space for a page they wanted to use, and the file was not closed in case the same backend needed to flush other pages from the same file. Perhaps we should arrange for a DROP DATABASE command to somehow signal all backends to close files from that backend? Or they should periodically check? -- Kevin Grittner EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company -- Sent via pgsql-general mailing list (pgsql-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-general