I am setting up a postgresql server (duh) and am using archive_mode=on The archive command that I am using sends data to an enterprise backup server across the network, and I must be able to handle outages of that server without taking down the postgresql server. Short outages are fine because the archive_command will return a non zero result to postgresql and it will be retried every minute until successful. If the backup server is out for a longer time, new WAL files will be created by postgresql. This will eventually fill the pg_xlog filesystem and bad things happen :-( To protect the production database functionality, when the pg_xlog filesystem reaches some percentage full (we chose 90%) then the archive_command starts reporting a success (return of zero) even though it is not able to archive the xlog files. I understand that this prevents me from doing a disaster recovery AND prevents me from doing a point in time restore, but in our opinion it is better than letting the database crash. Now to the question. Once the archive_command starts lying about its success, postgresql deletes a number of the xlog files that it has been told have been successfuly archived. Why does it do this? Can I control it? Can I turn it off? -- Evan Rempel, Senior Systems Administrator University of Victoria
