Re: [HACKERS] WAL archiving idle database

>>> On Fri, Oct 26, 2007 at 5:47 PM, in message <695(dot)1193438855(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us>,
Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:

> And after
> each archive_timeout, we test to see if we need to flush the current WAL
> segment out to the archive; which is determined by whether the write
> pointer is currently exactly at the start of a segment or not.

Hmmm... We would actually prefer to get the WAL file at the
specified interval. We have software to ensure that the warm
standby instances are not getting stale, and that's pretty simple
with the current behavior. We don't have a bandwidth or storage
space issue because we zero out the unused portion of the WAL file
and gzip it -- an empty file's about 16 KB. Checking that the whole
system is healthy gets a lot more complicated if we stop sending
empty WAL files.

Could this at least be a configurable option?

-Kevin