Re: Unexpectedly high disk space usage

On Mon, Nov 5, 2012 at 7:01 PM, Lists <lists(at)benjamindsmith(dot)com> wrote:
> We upgraded to 9.1 from 8.4 over the summer a few months ago, to new DB
> servers with more disk space and memory. Unexpectedly, the DB servers have
> steadily increased their disk space usage since. Reported system load
> doesn't seem to be affected. It's happening to all our DB servers running
> 9.1.
>
> When we reload all pg_dumps from our worst-affected server into an offline
> server, the disk space usage is about 26 GB, but the production database is
> using 166 GB. (# df /var/lib/pgsql;)

My first guesses would be things that are not directly under the
databases control, such as:

1) your server logs are accumulating and you aren't doing anything about them
2) you are taking backup snapshots to somewhere in that directory and
not cleaning them up
3) your archive_command is failing (which you should see reports of in
the server logs) and so you are accumulating xlog files.

Cheers,

Jeff