pg_stat_tmp

Hi all,

The past few days I’ve been encountering the following error, followed by a
full db restart and recovery

2013-12-16 07:12:53 GMT LOG: could not write temporary statistics file
"pg_stat_tmp/pgstat.tmp": No space left on device

This occurs at a time of moderate load, during the same set of operations
each morning.
Interestingly, when I execute this manually at any other time of date, the
process completes normally.

I presume that the pg_stat_tmp location is system-wide and likely is not
impacted by temp_tablespaces
The root partition, where postgresql is installed does not have a lot of
disk available (4GB).

My first instinct here is to symlink pg_stat_tmp against another disk with a
little more room to breathe, however I’m surprised that pgstat.tmp would
grow to be so large in the first place – possibly there is something else at
play here.

I should note that this issue has only recently occurred, no major changes
have been introduced.

Thanks for any advice on this.

Tim