Re: Hard limit on WAL space used (because PANIC sucks)

On Mon, Jun 10, 2013 at 4:42 PM, Josh Berkus <josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com> wrote:
> Daniel, Jeff,
>
>> I don't doubt this, that's why I do have a no-op fallback for
>> emergencies. The discussion was about defaults. I still think that
>> drop-wal-from-archiving-whenever is not a good one.
>
> Yeah, we can argue defaults for a long time. What would be better is
> some way to actually determine what the user is trying to do, or wants
> to happen. That's why I'd be in favor of an explict setting; if there's
> a setting which says:
>
> on_archive_failure=shutdown
>
> ... then it's a LOT clearer to the user what will happen if the archive
> runs out of space, even if we make no change to the defaults. And if
> that setting is changeable on reload, it even becomes a way for users to
> get out of tight spots.

I like your suggestion, save one thing: it's not a 'failure' or
archiving if it cannot keep up, provided one subscribes to the view
that archiving is not elective. I nit pick at this because one might
think this has something to do with a non-zero return code from the
archiving program, which already has a pretty alarmist message in
event of transient failures (I think someone brought this up on
-hackers but a few months ago...can't remember if that resulted in a
change).

I don't have a better suggestion that is less jargonrific though, but
I wanted to express my general appreciation as to the shape of the
suggestion.