When truncating a relation in-place (eg during VACUUM), do not try to unlink
authorTom Lane <[email protected]>
Mon, 20 Nov 2006 01:08:02 +0000 (01:08 +0000)
committerTom Lane <[email protected]>
Mon, 20 Nov 2006 01:08:02 +0000 (01:08 +0000)
commit5025ec2a383da57902fa3ee3395fd145f0743967
treeb9f36dc16571143e3650777dfd14a9da01d888ae
parent7c7f255426be478bd694a315d1a9ecc4901ef26d
When truncating a relation in-place (eg during VACUUM), do not try to unlink
any no-longer-needed segments; just truncate them to zero bytes and leave
the files in place for possible future re-use.  This avoids problems when
the segments are re-used due to relation growth shortly after truncation.
Before, the bgwriter, and possibly other backends, could still be holding
open file references to the old segment files, and would write dirty blocks
into those files where they'd disappear from the view of other processes.

Back-patch as far as 8.0.  I believe the 7.x branches are not vulnerable,
because they had no bgwriter, and "blind" writes by other backends would
always be done via freshly-opened file references.
src/backend/storage/smgr/md.c