Hello Robert On 2020-Oct-04, Robert Inder wrote: > One of the things I like about the old PGSQL 9 setup is that it generates > and ships a WAL file every few minutes, even if nothing has happened in the > database. > I find it re-assuring to be able to see WAL files arriving and being > processed without problem even when the live system was idle. > > But I cannot get PGSQL 12 to do this. It only writes (and thus ships) WAL > files when something happens in the database. > If the database is idle, it simply does not write any WAL files. This is on purpose; archiving WAL files that contain nothing is pure wastage of good electrons. I suggest that in PG12 you can monitor the "lag" of a standby server more directly by looking at columns write_lag, flush_lag, replay_lag in the pg_stat_replication view. (You'll need to change your configuration so that it uses streaming replication instead of pg_standby and rsync, but that's far more convenient so it's a good change anyway.)
