On Mar 25, 2014, at 7:58 PM, Adrian Klaver <adrian.kla...@aklaver.com> wrote:

> On 03/25/2014 04:52 PM, Steven Schlansker wrote:
>> 
> 
>>> Some more questions, what happens when things begin to dawn on me:)
>>> 
>>> You said the disk filled up entirely with log files yet currently the 
>>> number(size) of logs is growing.
>> 
>> It’s holding stable now.  I tried to vacuum up to clean some space which 
>> turned out to generate more pg_xlog activity than it saved space, and (I 
>> assume) the archiver fell behind and that was the source of the growing log. 
>>  There haven’t been any new segments since I stopped doing that.
> 
> Yea, vacuum just marks space as available for reuse it does not actually free 
> space.
> 

I even knew that.  Funny what you’ll forget when the system is down and you’re 
in a panic.

This is actually something that has bit me on more than one occasion — if you 
accidentally temporarily use too much space, it is *very* hard to back out of 
the situation.  It seems that the only way to actually release space to the 
system are VACUUM FULL, CLUSTER, or to DROP objects.  None of these can be 
executed without severe disruption to a running database.  A cluster operation 
on any of our tables that are large enough to matter can easily run through the 
night.

I can only keep wishing for a CLUSTER CONCURRENTLY or VACUUM FULL CONCURRENTLY 
that can run without a temporary copy of the entire table...



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