""Dan Austin"" <DAustin(at)au(dot)westfield(dot)com> wrote
>
> I take it that the file gets renamed almost immediately because we can
> also see writes to the parent directory -- but never see the file itself
> using ls.
>
I think so.
>
> /export/data/pgsql/data/base/64920741/pgsql_tmp/pgsql_tmp966.9
>
> What are these files used for? In this particular sample, that file was
> being written to a lot. Perhaps we're running out of memory for some
> sorting?
>
These files could be generated by several situations to store intermediate
data. For example, hash join and external sort. For sort, if you increase
sort_mem, then you may avoid/alleviate usage of temp file.
Regards,
Qingqing