On 06/06/2013 10:00 PM, Heikki Linnakangas wrote: > > I've seen a case, where it was even worse than a PANIC and shutdown. > pg_xlog was on a separate partition that had nothing else on it. The > partition filled up, and the system shut down with a PANIC. Because > there was no space left, it could not even write the checkpoint after > recovery, and thus refused to start up again. There was nothing else > on the partition that you could delete to make space. The only > recourse would've been to add more disk space to the partition > (impossible), or manually delete an old WAL file that was not needed > to recover from the latest checkpoint (scary). Fortunately this was a > test system, so we just deleted everything.
There were a couple of dba.stackexchange.com reports along the same lines recently, too. Both involved an antivirus vendor's VM appliance with a canned (stupid) configuration that set wal_keep_segments too high for the disk space allocated and stored WAL on a separate partition. People are having issues with WAL space management in the real world and I think it and autovacuum are the two hardest things for most people to configure and understand in Pg right now. -- Craig Ringer http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/ PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Training & Services -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
