Re: WAL segment management on a standby

On 07/12/2014 12:49 AM, John Scalia wrote:
> Again, thanks to all to have assisted me with getting the WAL segments
> to both my standby servers. Everything with that is now working quite
> well. I do have a related followup question, however. On these standby's
> nothing is built in to manage those WAL segments in the archive
> directory. Thus, that directory can grow to the point where it fills up
> the disk rather quickly. Any good strategies for dealing with the WAL
> segments that get put in there. Do I really need them after postgresql
> has copied them up into the pg_xlog directory? If so, how far back
> should I keep them? Yes, I know about keeping everything between
> backups. So, if my directory looks like:
>
> 00000000300000000C000000A1
> 00000000300000000C000000A2
> 00000000300000000C000000A3
> 00000000300000000C000000A3.backup
> 00000000300000000C000000A4
>
> Could I safely delete the *A1, *A2, and maybe even the *A3 files?

Take a look at the pg_archivecleanup tool.

You might also want to look at PgBarman to automate this.

--
Craig Ringer http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Training & Services