On Thu, Apr 21, 2011 at 11:22 AM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> Florian Weimer <fweimer@bfk.de> writes:
>> * Adrian Klaver:
>>>> Interesting. Is there an easy way to monitor WAL traffic in away?
>
>>> They are found in $DATA/pg_xlog so checking the size of that
>>> directory regularly would get you the information.
>
>> But log files are recycled, so looking at the directory alone does not
>> seem particularly helpful.
>
> "du" would be useless, but you could check the name of the newest WAL
> segment file from time to time, and do a bit of math to see how much
> WAL had been written since the previous time.
I'd think using sysstat packages sar is the way to see how much work
your drives are doing. Assuming the sysstat package / daemon is set
to monitor disk block activity.