Hi! When do I need to call d/shutdown? I assume I should do it when using a local Asami before shutting down the JVM to ensure that any pending writes have been finished. Is it so? Thank you!

Not exactly… once a transaction has returned then all pending writes are done. Files are opened to be larger than they need to be. This allows them to be memory mapped as data is allocated in them. Shutdown will truncate the files to just what is written in them

If the process is killed instead of being shutdown cleanly, the files stay big. But if that happens you open and then shutdown again, and then the file will be correctly truncated