Re: Deleted files still open long after droping a database

On Monday 17 February 2014 18:46:49 Vincent de Phily wrote:
> Hi List,
>
> 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) ?

I solved that particular issue by disabling and reenabling autovacuum. So I
finally got my disk space back, but I'm still interested in an answer to those
questions.

> 3) Is there a generally cleaner way to do all this ?

--
Vincent de Phily