Re: Vacuum full - disk space eaten by WAL logfiles

"Lee Wu" <Lwu(at)mxlogic(dot)com> writes:
> When we do weekly "vacuum full", PG uses all space and causes PG down.

This implies that checkpoints aren't completing for some reason.
If they were, they'd be recycling WAL space.

I'm not aware of any problems in 7.3 that would block a checkpoint
indefinitely, but we have seen cases where it just took too darn long
to do the checkpoint --- implying either a ridiculously large
shared_buffers setting, or a drastic shortage of I/O bandwidth.

You might want to try strace'ing the checkpoint process to see if it
seems to be making progress or not.

Also, are you certain that this is happening during a VACUUM? The
log messages you show refer to COPY commands.

> PostgreSQL 7.3.2 on i686-pc-linux-gnu, compiled by GCC 2.96

Are you aware of the number and significance of post-7.3.2 bug fixes
in the 7.3 branch? You really ought to be on 7.3.8, if you can't afford
to migrate to 7.4 right now.

regards, tom lane