Tom,
Thanks for your reply.
> [...]
> > UID PID D BLOCK SIZE COMM PATHNAME
> > 103 687 W 120384 98304 postgres
> > /export/data/pgsql/data/global/pgstat.tmp.687
>
> Hmm. That's the stats collector creating a new current-stats file,
> which it does every half second or so.
I take it that the file gets renamed almost immediately because we can
also see writes to the parent directory -- but never see the file itself
using ls.
We can probably turn the stats collection off but it does help diagnose
certain classes of production problem. Will turn it off on one of the
servers and see what happens.
I'm starting to think maybe we need to tune the memory parameters.
There's also a lot of writing to files that look like this:
/export/data/pgsql/data/base/64920741/pgsql_tmp/pgsql_tmp966.9
What are these files used for? In this particular sample, that file was
being written to a lot. Perhaps we're running out of memory for some
sorting? We've dialled the logging down a little so we're not logging
pid's and statements to see what query that backend is doing.
Thanks again.
Dan
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