WAL filling up disk

Hi all,

There was a question on the postgresql-br list the other day that I
couldn't answer and was curious about it.

This guy has is evaluating PG 7.1(.1?) and has a 1 million records 
table. He then does a "update tablefoo set somefield = 123" and WAL
eventually causes his 4 Gb disk to fill up and never complete the
transaction.

According to him, there are over 250 16Mb files under pg_xlog (I
understand 16 Mb is the default segment file size for WAL).

Can anyone give me more details as to why this happens and the possible
configurations that should be changed?

Thanks in advance.

-Roberto

-- 
+----| http://fslc.usu.edu/ USU Free Software & GNU/Linux Club |------+ Roberto Mello - Computer Science, USU -
http://www.brasileiro.net/      http://www.sdl.usu.edu/ - Space Dynamics Lab, Developer    
 
* * * <- Tribbles  . . . <- Tribbles after a haircut