On Thu, Oct 7, 2010 at 8:46 PM, Steve Singer <ssinger@ca.afilias.info> wrote:
> Then you have to deal with telling the archive how long it needs to keep WAL
> segments because the master might ask for them back.
Yeah, it's not easy to determine how long we should keep the archived WAL files.
We need to calculate which WAL file is deletable according to the progress of
each standby and the state of the stored base backups which still might be used
for PITR.
> If the archive is
> remote from the master then you have some extra network copying going on.
Yep, so I think that the master (i.e., walsender) should read the archived
WAL file by using restore_command specified by users. If the archive is
remote from the master, then we would need to specify something like scp in
restore_command. Also, even if you compress the archived WAL file by using
pg_compress, the master can decompress it by using pg_decompress in
restore_command and transfer it.
> It would be better to let the slave being reconfigured to read the missing
> WAL from the archive.
That's one of choices.
But I've heard that some people don't want to set up the shared archive area
which can be accessed by the master and the standby. For example, they feel
that it's complex to configure NFS server or automatic-scp-without-password
setting for sharing the archived WAL files.
Currently we have to increase wal_keep_segments to work around that problem.
But the pg_xlog disk space is usually small and not suitable to keep many
WAL files. So we might be unable to increase wal_keep_segments.
If we allow the master to stream WAL files from the archive, we don't need
to increase wal_keep_segments and set up such a complex configuration. So
this idea is one of useful choices, I think.
Regards,
--
Fujii Masao
NIPPON TELEGRAPH AND TELEPHONE CORPORATION
NTT Open Source Software Center