Re: Disc space usage

Matthew Wakeling <matthew@flymine.org> writes:
> On Wed, 8 Oct 2008, Tom Lane wrote:
>> Anything under $PGDATA/base that doesn't correspond to a live row in
>> pg_database is junk.

> So I can delete it? Might be safer to stop the db server while I do that
> though.

In principle, at least, you shouldn't need to --- there shouldn't be any
buffers representing such files.

>> What PG version is this, anyway?

> Postgres 8.3.0

You should consider an update to 8.3.4.  A quick look in the post-8.3.0
CVS logs shows a couple of possibly relevant fixes:

2008-04-18 13:05  tgl

    * src/: backend/commands/dbcommands.c, include/port.h,
    port/dirmod.c (REL8_3_STABLE): Fix rmtree() so that it keeps going
    after failure to remove any individual file; the idea is that we
    should clean up as much as we can, even if there's some problem
    removing one file.  Make the error messages a bit less misleading,
    too.  In passing, const-ify function arguments.

2008-04-16 19:59  tgl

    * src/: backend/access/nbtree/nbtree.c,
    backend/access/nbtree/nbtutils.c, backend/access/transam/xlog.c,
    backend/commands/dbcommands.c, backend/port/ipc_test.c,
    backend/storage/ipc/ipc.c, include/access/nbtree.h,
    include/storage/ipc.h, include/utils/elog.h (REL8_3_STABLE): Repair
    two places where SIGTERM exit could leave shared memory state
    corrupted.  (Neither is very important if SIGTERM is used to shut
    down the whole database cluster together, but there's a problem if
    someone tries to SIGTERM individual backends.)    To do this,
    introduce new infrastructure macros
    PG_ENSURE_ERROR_CLEANUP/PG_END_ENSURE_ERROR_CLEANUP that take care
    of transiently pushing an on_shmem_exit cleanup hook.  Also use
    this method for createdb cleanup --- that wasn't a
    shared-memory-corruption problem, but SIGTERM abort of createdb
    could leave orphaned files lying around.

            regards, tom lane