Honorable members of the list, I would like to share with you a side effect that I discovered today on our postgresql 8.1 server. We ve been running this instance with PITR for now 2 months without any problems. The wal's are copied to a remote machine with the pg_archive_command and locally to some other directory. For some independant reasons we made the remote machine unreachable for some hours. The pg_archive_command returned as expected a failure value. Now to what puzzles me: the load on the box that normally is kept between 0.7 and 1.5 did suddenly rise to 4.5 -5.5 and the processes responsiveness got bad. The dir pg_xlog has plenty of space to keep several day of wal's. there was no unfinished backup's or whatever that could have apparently slowed the machine that much. So the question is: is there a correlation between not getting the wal's archived and this "massive" load growth? In my understanding, as the pgl engine has nothing more to do with the filled up log except just to make sure it's archived correctly ther should not be any significant load increase for this reason. Looking at the logs the engine tried approx. every 3 minutes to archive the wal's. Is this behaviour expected, If it is then is it reasonnable to burden the engine that is already in a inexpected situation with some IMHO unecessary load increase. your thougths are welcome Cedric
