Re: too many clog files

Alvaro Herrera wrote:
> Move the old clog files back where they were, and run VACUUM FREEZE in
> all your databases. That should clean up all the old pg_clog files, if
> you're really that desperate.

Has anyone actually seen a CLOG file get removed under 8.2 or 8.3? How about 8.1?

I'm probably missing something, but looking at src/backend/commands/vacuum.c (under 8.2.9 and 8.3.3), it seems like vac_truncate_clog() scans through *all* tuples of pg_database looking for the oldest datfrozenxid. Won't that always be template0, which as far as I know can never be vacuumed (or otherwise connected to)?

postgres=# select datname, datfrozenxid, age(datfrozenxid), datallowconn from pg_database order by age(datfrozenxid), datname ;
datname | datfrozenxid | age | datallowconn
------------------+--------------+----------+--------------
template1 | 36347792 | 3859 | t
postgres | 36347733 | 3918 | t
mss_test | 36347436 | 4215 | t
template0 | 526 | 36351125 | f
(4 rows)

I looked at several of my 8.2 databases' pg_clog directories, and they all have all the sequentially numbered segments (0000 through current segment). Would it be reasonable for vac_truncate_clog() to skip databases where datallowconn is false (i.e. template0)? Looking back to the 8.1.13 code, it does exactly that:
if (!dbform->datallowconn)
continue;

Also, Duan, if you have lots of files under pg_clog, you may be burning through transactions faster than necessary. Do your applications leave autocommit turned on? And since no one else mentioned it, as a work-around for a small filesystem you can potentially shutdown your database, move the pg_clog directory to a separate filesystem, and create a symlink to it under your PGDATA directory. That's not a solution, just a mitigation.