Christopher Kings-Lynne <chriskl@familyhealth.com.au> writes:
> I've got a PITR set up here that's happily scp'ing WAL files across to
> another machine. However, the NIC in the machine is currently stuffed,
> so it gets like 50k/s :) What happens in general if you are generating
> WAL file bytes faster always than they can be copied off?
If you keep falling further and further behind, eventually your pg_xlog
directory will fill the space available on its disk, and I think at that
point PG will panic and shut down because it can't create any more xlog
segments.
> Also, does the archive dir just basically keep filling up forever? How
> do I know when I can prune some files? Anything older than the last
> full backup?
Anything older than the starting checkpoint of the last full backup that
you might want to restore to. We need to adjust the backup procedure so
that the starting segment number for a backup is more readily visible;
see recent discussions about logging that explicitly in some fashion.
regards, tom lane