On Thu, 12 Aug 2004, Thomas Madsen wrote:
> I'm running a production server with PostgreSQL version 7.2.1, that does
You really should upgrade. If not to 7.4.x, at least to the last 7.2
release.
> The problem is that TOAST tables keeps springing forth and consume disk
> space.
> We do a VACUUM every night, but it does not reduce or stop the TOAST
> table growth.
>
> I searched the mailing list for answers to this problem, but found only
> other people describing the same problem.
> Namely, that their max_fsm_pages were too low and that postgresql now
> has lost track of the surplus TOAST data pages.
>
> In our postgresql.conf we ourselves had the default value of 10000 for
> max_fsm_pages, which I have now raised to around a million.
> I restarted psql and did a vacuum to see if that would reduce the disk
> usage, but no change was seen.
Generally, raising fsm and revacuuming (without full) will mean that more
of the space will get re-used so that it should stop growing from day to
day, but it's not really going to remove space already taken (excepting
blank pages at the end if it can get appropriate locks I think).
Vacuum Full should remove the blank space at the cost of an exclusive lock
on the table.