On a master PostgreSQL 9.5 server, we consistently have 160-180GB of WAL
files being stored, which span a 6-7 day time period. I'd like to reduce
this so that we aren't using as much space, and also because we won't ever
need to recover that far into the past (we'd just restore a backup at that
point).
I've tried changing settings such as wal_keep_segments and max_wal_size but
they don't seem to have an effect, even after a full server restart. For
example, I've set max_wal_size to 256MB but the files themselves remain at
512MB.
Is there some part of the process I'm missing, or a setting?