Re: Subject: bool / vacuum full bug followup

On Thu, 2 May 2002, Jeffrey Baker wrote:

> On Thu, May 02, 2002 at 04:30:15PM -0600, Scott Marlowe wrote:
> > OK, this is just beyond weird.  I swear to GOD that my table size was
> > growing.  I'm on a workstation that doesn't accept connections from
> > anybody but me.

>> SNIPPAGE

> > And after that, the table started growing after all vacuum fulls.  I can't
> > reproduce it now.  I blew away the table, recreated it, and now it doesn't
> > do that.  I blew away the database, and installed 7.2.1 and it won't do
> > it.  I reinstalled 7.2 and blew away the database and it still won't do
> > it.

> Well, if the table has an associated TOAST table, it is possible
> that it will suddenly start growing out of control, and nothing you
> can do with VACUUM will help.  The TOAST system has a free space map
> (FSM) with some default number of pages it can track.  If you exceed
> this number, it will become completely unable to reclaim space.  If
> this happens you will have to dump and reload the database or take
> other drastic action.
>
> Check the VACUUM VERBOSE output to see the pages in your TOAST
> tables.

Thanks, I'll do that.  The tuples themselves were quite small, a single
ascii character in a text field and a single boole.  So I wouldn't expect
them to be toasted.