Fun fact about autovacuum and orphan temp tables

Hello, hackers!

We were testing how well some application works with PostgreSQL and
stumbled upon an autovacuum behavior which I fail to understand.
Application in question have a habit to heavily use temporary tables in
funny ways.
For example it creates A LOT of them.
Which is ok.
Funny part is that it never drops them. So when backend is finally
terminated, it tries to drop them and fails with error:

FATAL: out of shared memory
HINT: You might need to increase max_locks_per_transaction

If I understand that rigth, we are trying to drop all these temp tables
in one transaction and running out of locks to do so.
After that postgresql.log is flooded at the rate 1k/s with messages like
that:

LOG: autovacuum: found orphan temp table "pg_temp_15"."tt38147" in
database "DB_TEST"

It produces a noticeable load on the system and it`s getting worst with
every terminated backend or restart.
I did some RTFS and it appears that autovacuum has no intention of
cleaning that orphan tables unless
it`s wraparound time:

src/backend/postmaster/autovacuum.c
/* We just ignore it if the owning backend is still active */
2037 if (backendID == MyBackendId ||
BackendIdGetProc(backendID) == NULL)
2038 {
2039 /*
2040 * We found an orphan temp table (which was
probably left
2041 * behind by a crashed backend). If it's so old
as to need
2042 * vacuum for wraparound, forcibly drop it.
Otherwise just
2043 * log a complaint.
2044 */
2045 if (wraparound)
2046 {
2047 ObjectAddress object;
2048
2049 ereport(LOG,
2050 (errmsg("autovacuum: dropping orphan
temp table \"%s\".\"%s\" in database \"%s\"",
2051 get_namespace_name(classForm->relnamespace),
2052 NameStr(classForm->relname),
2053 get_database_name(MyDatabaseId))));
2054 object.classId = RelationRelationId;
2055 object.objectId = relid;
2056 object.objectSubId = 0;
2057 performDeletion(&object, DROP_CASCADE,
PERFORM_DELETION_INTERNAL);
2058 }
2059 else
2060 {
2061 ereport(LOG,
2062 (errmsg("autovacuum: found orphan
temp table \"%s\".\"%s\" in database \"%s\"",
2063 get_namespace_name(classForm->relnamespace),
2064 NameStr(classForm->relname),
2065 get_database_name(MyDatabaseId))));
2066 }
2067 }
2068 }

What is more troubling is that pg_statistic is starting to bloat badly.

LOG: automatic vacuum of table "DB_TEST.pg_catalog.pg_statistic": index
scans: 0
pages: 0 removed, 68225 remain, 0 skipped due to pins
tuples: 0 removed, 2458382 remain, 2408081 are dead but not yet
removable
buffer usage: 146450 hits, 31 misses, 0 dirtied
avg read rate: 0.010 MB/s, avg write rate: 0.000 MB/s
system usage: CPU 3.27s/6.92u sec elapsed 23.87 sec

What is the purpose of keeping orphan tables around and not dropping
them on the spot?

--
Grigory Smolkin
Postgres Professional: http://www.postgrespro.com
The Russian Postgres Company