PostgreSQL and FreeBSD SoftUpdates
Hi guys,
Does anyone else have this problem?
We have softupdates turned on on our data dir. (Soon to be turned off
due to these issues).
The partition is 12GB. 'df' says that we're using 12 and a bit GB but
'du' says we're using 2GB (which we really are).
It seems that perhaps softupdates is caching some stuff, or preventing
something from being written properly, etc.
The funny thing is that this was never a problem until we upgraded to
7.4. Has something changed in the way file writes or syncs are done?
Chris
what version of FreeBSD are you using? I'm running 4.9-STABLE with
softupdates on my db file system ...
On Tue, 30 Mar 2004, Christopher Kings-Lynne wrote:
Hi guys,
Does anyone else have this problem?
We have softupdates turned on on our data dir. (Soon to be turned off
due to these issues).The partition is 12GB. 'df' says that we're using 12 and a bit GB but
'du' says we're using 2GB (which we really are).It seems that perhaps softupdates is caching some stuff, or preventing
something from being written properly, etc.The funny thing is that this was never a problem until we upgraded to
7.4. Has something changed in the way file writes or syncs are done?Chris
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Marc G. Fournier Hub.Org Networking Services (http://www.hub.org)
Email: scrappy@hub.org Yahoo!: yscrappy ICQ: 7615664
what version of FreeBSD are you using? I'm running 4.9-STABLE with
softupdates on my db file system ...
FreeBSD goddard.calorieking.com 4.9-STABLE FreeBSD 4.9-STABLE #2: Mon
Jan 26 23:23:17 EST 2004
wg@goddard.calorieking.com:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GODDARD i386
We're not 100% sure it's softupdates, but we can't see anything else
that it could be.
Chris
On Tue, 30 Mar 2004, Christopher Kings-Lynne wrote:
what version of FreeBSD are you using? I'm running 4.9-STABLE with
softupdates on my db file system ...FreeBSD goddard.calorieking.com 4.9-STABLE FreeBSD 4.9-STABLE #2: Mon
Jan 26 23:23:17 EST 2004
wg@goddard.calorieking.com:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GODDARD i386We're not 100% sure it's softupdates, but we can't see anything else
that it could be.
Right off the top of my head, it almost sounds like a file is being held
open after its been deleted ... we went through that with the new aspseek
a little while back, where 170gig just disappeared overnight, but du
showed hardly any disk space being used ...
Does restarting the database server (not rebooting, just restarting the
postmaster) free up the disk space?
----
Marc G. Fournier Hub.Org Networking Services (http://www.hub.org)
Email: scrappy@hub.org Yahoo!: yscrappy ICQ: 7615664
Right off the top of my head, it almost sounds like a file is being held
open after its been deleted ... we went through that with the new aspseek
a little while back, where 170gig just disappeared overnight, but du
showed hardly any disk space being used ...Does restarting the database server (not rebooting, just restarting the
postmaster) free up the disk space?
No - have to reboot. That's probably because of softupdates though.
Chris
On Tue, 30 Mar 2004, Christopher Kings-Lynne wrote:
Right off the top of my head, it almost sounds like a file is being held
open after its been deleted ... we went through that with the new aspseek
a little while back, where 170gig just disappeared overnight, but du
showed hardly any disk space being used ...Does restarting the database server (not rebooting, just restarting the
postmaster) free up the disk space?No - have to reboot. That's probably because of softupdates though.
'k, *shouldn't* require a reboot ... but, what I'd try is to do what
you've thought .. disable softupdates and see if you can recreate ... if
killing off the process auto-reclaims the space fast, then it sounds like
a stale file being held open (log file being rotated improperly?) ...
----
Marc G. Fournier Hub.Org Networking Services (http://www.hub.org)
Email: scrappy@hub.org Yahoo!: yscrappy ICQ: 7615664
'k, *shouldn't* require a reboot ... but, what I'd try is to do what
you've thought .. disable softupdates and see if you can recreate ... if
killing off the process auto-reclaims the space fast, then it sounds like
a stale file being held open (log file being rotated improperly?) ...
Log file's on a different partition...
Chris
Right off the top of my head, it almost sounds like a file is being
held
open after its been deleted ... we went through that with the new
aspseek
a little while back, where 170gig just disappeared overnight, but du
showed hardly any disk space being used ...Does restarting the database server (not rebooting, just restarting
the
postmaster) free up the disk space?No - have to reboot. That's probably because of softupdates though.
'k, *shouldn't* require a reboot ... but, what I'd try is to do what
you've thought .. disable softupdates and see if you can recreate ...
if
killing off the process auto-reclaims the space fast, then it sounds
like
a stale file being held open (log file being rotated improperly?) ...
Install the latest version of lsof(8) and see if there are any stale
files being held open. I've got databases on FreeBSD 4.X and 5.X with
softupdates on both and haven't had a problem. I'm wondering if your
database is doing something "exotic" that hasn't been tickled. The
first thing that comes to mind is, are you using deferred constraints?
Second, if it is a soft updates issue, then a reboot isn't necessary
(as Marc says)... you should be able to stop the database and type df
-k && sync && sleep 30 && df -k see space being freed up. -sc
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Sean Chittenden