Re: [Slony1-general] WAL partition overloaded--by autovacuum?

On Jul 8, 2010, at 12:04 PM, Kevin Grittner wrote:

> Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>
>> I don't understand how you managed to fill up 37GB of disk with
>> WAL files. Every time you fill up checkpoint_segments * 16MB of
>> WAL files, you ought to get a checkpoint. When it's complete, WAL
>> segments completely written before the start of the checkpoint
>> should be recyclable. Unless I'm confused, which apparently I am.
>
> You're not alone. At first I was assuming that it was because of
> archiving, but the OP says that's turned off. Unless it had been on
> and there wasn't a *restart* after changing the configuration, I
> can't see how this could happen, and was hoping someone else could
> cast some light on the issue.

I'm fairly confused myself. I'm beginning to think that because data/base and data/pg_xlog were on the same partition (/db), when the /db partition filled, up the WAL files couldn't get flushed to data/base, thereby preventing data/pg_xlog from being emptied out, as per the documentation.

My concern is that--as in the original post--there were moments where 129 WAL files were generated in one minute. Is it plausible that this autovacuum could be responsible for this?

--Richard