Re: warm standby possible with 8.1?

On Sun, Mar 28, 2010 at 8:20 PM, Yar Tykhiy <yar(at)barnet(dot)com(dot)au> wrote:
>
> Guys, I'm afraid there may be some confusion here. I've got a warm
> standby happily running with simple home-made archive and restore
> scripts on a legacy Postgresql installation as old as 8.0. And yes, I
> did failover multiple times (I posted a report or two on that to this
> list.)
>
> What Zhong isn't going to get is converting the master node to a warm
> standby node as easily as by just stopping it and renaming recovery.done
> to recovery.conf. The way to go here is to take a file-level DB backup
> from the master node and bootstrap a new warm standby node from it, then
> let it catch up with the master node WAL-wise.
>
> Yar
>

Greg confirmed the capability of 8.1 for me. While I am still
sticking with 8.1, I think what I am doing is the same as Yar but
I don't completely understand his terminology.

What I do is every now and then, existing archive files on standby
server are wiped out and
the whole data directory on standby server has to refreshed from the
master db and WAL starts to accumulate again on the standy server.
Two things can force you to refresh like that: 1) archive data on
standby server can get very big and you can easily run out of disk
space.
2) if you don't want to play lots of wal files and wait a very long
time on actual recovery you will need to refresh it.

In my case wal files accumulate quickly on standby server because I am
also sending fake traffic (as suggested by a website) frequently
because I am not supposed to lose no more than five minutes of transaction data.