Re: Nasty VACUUM/bgwriter/segmentation bug

Joshua D. Drake wrote:
> On Sun, 2006-11-19 at 11:28 -0800, Josh Berkus wrote:
>> Tom, 
>>
>>> Let's go with the easy fix. With regular 1GB segment size, having a few
>>> empty files in the data directory isn't going to hurt anyone.
>> No, but it will confuse DBAs ("What the heck are all these 0B files?").  Maybe 
>> we should add code to VACUUM to look for these empty file segments and unlink 
>> them if they haven't been touched in a while (say, a day?).
> 
> I don't buy this argument. A smart DBA isn't going to do any such thing.
> If you go around deleting unknown files you deserve everything you get.
> Especially if you are in the middle of a PostgreSQL cluster tree.

Couldn't some application trigger this problem regularly (Say, once a day while
importing new data), and therefore create an ever increasing number of empty
files that you can't get rid of without backup,reinit and restore?

Maybe postgres could delete them during recovery?

greetings, Florian Pflug