Re: PostgreSQL reclaiming table space

Anthony Bull <antsbull(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> About 3 hours after the Vacuum full completed, the disk space got returned
> to the OS - now Windows is reporting it has all that disk back. Must have
> been waiting for something? Anyway, great news!

Probably means that some session was holding on to an open-file pointer
to the old copy of the table. It's difficult to ensure that such
pointers are released quickly without causing performance degradation
for normal cases. (But having said that, I think we've fixed some bugs
in which pointers were held open unnecessarily. You didn't say exactly
how old a PG version you were using ...)

regards, tom lane