Re: Hard limit on WAL space used (because PANIC sucks)

On Mon, Jun 10, 2013 at 11:59 AM, Josh Berkus <josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com> wrote:
> Anyway, what I'm pointing out is that this is a business decision, and
> there is no way that we can make a decision for the users what to do
> when we run out of WAL space. And that the "stop archiving" option
> needs to be there for users, as well as the "shut down" option.
> *without* requiring users to learn the internals of the archiving system
> to implement it, or to know the implied effects of non-obvious
> PostgreSQL settings.

I don't doubt this, that's why I do have a no-op fallback for
emergencies. The discussion was about defaults. I still think that
drop-wal-from-archiving-whenever is not a good one.

You may have noticed I also wrote that a neater, common way to drop
WAL when under pressure might be nice, to avoid having it ad-hoc and
all over, so it's not as though I wanted to suggest an Postgres
feature to this effect was an anti-feature.

And, as I wrote before, it's much easier to teach an external system
to drop WAL than it is to teach Postgres to attenuate, hence the
repeated correspondence from my fellows and myself about attenuation
side of the equation.

Hope that clears things up about where I stand on the matter.