Re: Cleaning up unreferenced table files

Tom Lane wrote:
> Heikki Linnakangas <hlinnaka@iki.fi> writes:
> > On Tue, 26 Apr 2005, Tom Lane wrote:
> >> Heikki Linnakangas <hlinnaka@iki.fi> writes:
> >>> I feel that crashes that leaves behind stale files are rare.
> >>
> >> Indeed, and getting more so all the time ...
>
> > How so? Have changes been made in those parts of the code?
>
> No, just that the overall reliability of Postgres keeps improving.
>
> At the time that TODO entry was created, I don't think we even had the
> ability to roll back table creates/drops properly, so there were
> scenarios in which unreferenced files could be left behind without even
> assuming any software error.  And the prevalence of backend crashes was
> way higher than it is now, too.  So I think a good argument could be
> made that the TODO item isn't nearly as important as it was at the time.
>
> > If nobody ever runs into this issue in production, and this whole exercise
> > turns out to be completely unnecessary, at least we'll know. That alone
> > makes me feel better.
>
> We will know no such thing, unless the patch is made to announce the
> problem so intrusively that people are certain to see it *and report it
> to us*.  Which I don't think will be acceptable.

Well, if putting it in the server logs isn't enough, I don't know what
is.

I think we do need the patch, at least to find out if there is an issue
we don't know about.  I don't see the hard in it.

Heikki, would you time startup and tell us what percentage of time is
taken by the routines?  Or I can do it.

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