Hello Roel, Wednesday, December 18, 2002, 7:23:49 AM, you wrote:
RRIS> Hi all, RRIS> on of our dbmail-using customers runs a postgresql database containing RRIS> about 10GB of data; there are ~23000 accounts, 5000 of them are being RRIS> accessed regularly. The database is not growing (only POP is run), RRIS> about 20000 messages are delivered each day. RRIS> The problem is that postgresql keeps on eating disk space - after a RRIS> recent crash (due to running a VACUUM FULL on a near-full disk) a RRIS> backup was restored and the database was shrunk from 65GB to 10GB. RRIS> Since then, postgresql has resumed it's eating functionality, the size RRIS> occupied on disk is now some 46 GB while the database had not grown. RRIS> I would like to ask the postgresql experts on this list some advice: RRIS> how to reclaim disk space? For now, each night a VACUUM ANALYZE runs on RRIS> the database. Any chance i can see where exactly postgresql is growing? RRIS> Would re-building the indices help? Rebuilding indices could help but the space recovered would be marginal. If everything else looks ok, my bet is that you could have orphaned Large Objects (i.e. BLOBs). There is a tool named 'vacuumlo' on the contrib dir on the PostgreSQL distribution that is supposed to help. But these orphaned Large Objects should not exist; they mean a bug on the code that handles the database (the Large Object chunks should have been deleted). Please monitor the catalog table pg_largeobject to check if it's the cause of the growth. Best Regards, Steve Howe
