Re: Trimming transaction logs after extended WAL archive failures

On Mar 25, 2014, at 3:52 PM, Adrian Klaver <adrian(dot)klaver(at)aklaver(dot)com> wrote:

> On 03/25/2014 01:56 PM, Steven Schlansker wrote:
>> Hi everyone,
>>
>> I have a Postgres 9.3.3 database machine. Due to some intelligent work on the part of someone who shall remain nameless, the WAL archive command included a ‘> /dev/null 2>&1’ which masked archive failures until the disk entirely filled with 400GB of pg_xlog entries.
>>
>> I have fixed the archive command and can see WAL segments being shipped off of the server, however the xlog remains at a stable size and is not shrinking. In fact, it’s still growing at a (much slower) rate.
>
> So what is wal_keep_segments set at in postgresql.conf?
>

5000. There are currently about 18000 WAL segments in pg_xlog.

>>
>> I’ve seen references to people just deleting “old” segment files or using pg_resetxlog to fix this situation, however I already know that the response from the mailing list will be “that’s insane, don’t do that”.
>>
>> So what is the correct solution to pursue here? The steady state of the machine should have enough space, I just need to reclaim some of it... Thanks for any guidance!
>>
>> Steven
>>
>>
>>
>
>
> --
> Adrian Klaver
> adrian(dot)klaver(at)aklaver(dot)com