Understanding Temp Files in Postgres

Adrienne Domingus
4 min readJan 21, 2020
Photo by Kolar.io on Unsplash

Databases can feel like black boxes that hum along perfectly until suddenly they don’t. And when bad things happen with databases…they’re usually bad! One example of an error you might run into unexpectedly with your database is something about running out of temporary file space.

This is not intended to be a comprehensive look at temp files and the internals of how they work, but just to be a primer to get you started with a solid understanding of what they are and what kind of statistics you might run into as you are figuring out how to optimize your database to handle complex queries and temp files — I link to several other resources throughout that might help you make a deeper dive into this. Let’s get to it!

What are temp files?

At their core, databases are file systems. Data is persisted to the disk for long term storage, but data is also cached in memory if it’s frequently accessed, or currently being accessed, for quicker access.

When you write complex queries against a Postgres database that includes joins, sorting, DISTINCT queries, etc., those can require more memory than is available. When that happens, Postgres falls back to what are called temp files - these are actually stored on disk but only live for the length of the query. Once the query returns, the temp files are erased — hence the name!

What‘s the problem with temp files?

They’re slow!

Slower than memory, at least. That’s why databases default to memory when available, but using temp files are better than the query failing to execute. Usage of temp files also typically indicates long-running queries, so these are queries that are likely to be slow to return anyway, and may cause slowdowns on your application.

You have limited space for temp files

If you run out of temp file space you could see a PGError that reads something like could not write to temporary file: No space left on device. This will cause the queries in question to fail to execute entirely. And the problem can be compounding — too many temp files generated by one query can cause another query to not have the space it needs to execute.

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