Re: archive_timeout behavior for no activity

Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us> wrote:
> Looking at the archive_timeout documentation and
> CheckArchiveTimeout(), it appears we force a new xlog file and
> archive it even if no activity has been recorded in the xlog file.
> Is this correct?  Should we document this or fix it so only xlog
> files with contents are archived?
Er, you can probably blame me for that.  Tom was going to fix it and
I pointed out that it would break our monitoring of our warm standby
processes.  We have a one hour maximum and send alerts if we've gone
75 minutes or more without receiving a WAL file from one of our
databases.  Of course, if we had a nicer way to know that we were
up-to-date with our WAL file copies, we wouldn't need this; but
right now there aren't a lot of options for monitoring these things.
-Kevin