Re: Streaming Replication and archiving

Tom Lane wrote:
> Mark Kirkwood <mark(dot)kirkwood(at)catalyst(dot)net(dot)nz> writes:
>
>> Josh Berkus wrote:
>>
>>> Sure, but if the archived WAL segments are NOT needed, how are they
>>> supposed to get deleted? It doesn't take long to run out of disk space
>>> if they're not being rotated.
>>>
>
>
>> From what I am seeing at the moment (8.5 devel from 2 days ago), the
>> archived segments are not deleted at all (I have several hundred now
>> after a number of pgbench runs over the last day or so).
>>
>
> Huh? *Archived* segments aren't supposed to get deleted, at least not
> by any automatic Postgres action. It would be up to the DBA how long
> he wants to keep them around.
>
>
>

Exactly - there was a comment in the 'retry from archive' thread that
suggested otherwise. The likely typical use case for streaming
replication makes a good case and automated safe way of pruning these
guys - I've seen a few cases where overly aggressive cleanup has broken
log shipping setups (usually 8.2, before the restart option was available).

regards

Mark