Re: dropping a master table and all of its partitions?

George Nychis <gnychis(at)cmu(dot)edu> writes:
> Tom Lane wrote:
>> While neither number
>> is exactly awe-inspiring, I'm not seeing why you think the DROP is
>> particularly broken?
>>
> Then maybe it's a bug in my version of postgresql, what version are you using?

I tried it on HEAD and 8.2 and didn't see a problem. Just now I retried
on 8.1 and indeed it eats memory :-(. It looks like the immediate
difference is the lack of this 8.2 fix:

2006-01-08 15:04 tgl

* src/backend/utils/cache/relcache.c: Avoid leaking memory while
reading toasted entries from pg_rewrite, and nail a couple more
system indexes into cache. This doesn't make any difference in
normal system operation, but when forcing constant cache resets
it's difficult to get through the rules regression test without
these changes.

There are quite a few other changes in 8.2 that are likely to help you
if you want to work with large numbers of partitions, so rather than
worrying about whether this change would be safe to back-patch, I'd
suggest an upgrade. Even with 8.2 though I'm not sure that you will get
decent performance with thousands of partitions. That infrastructure
is intended for maybe 10 to 100 partitions, not thousands ...

regards, tom lane