Re: [HACKERS] WAL archiving idle database

On Fri, 2007-10-26 at 18:06 -0500, Kevin Grittner wrote:
> Hmmm... We would actually prefer to get the WAL file at the
> specified interval. We have software to ensure that the warm
> standby instances are not getting stale, and that's pretty simple
> with the current behavior. We don't have a bandwidth or storage

Another thought: when you say it's "pretty simple", what do you do now?
My monitoring scripts for this particular situation employ some pretty
ugly code.

I think if this did get changed, I would change my script to monitor the
pg_current_xlog_location() of the primary database and compare to the
last "restored log file..." entry in the standby database's log.

I would think if the current location does not end in all zeros, you
should expect a new WAL segment to be archived soon. Although this
assumes that an idle database would not advance that location at all,
and I'm still trying to understand Tom's proposal well enough to know
whether that would be true or not.

If this doesn't get changed, I think we should archive every
archive_timeout seconds, rather than
MAX(archive_timeout,checkpoint_timeout), which is less obvious.

Regards,
Jeff Davis