Trimming transaction logs after extended WAL archive failures

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.

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