PG11.2 - wal_level =minimal max_wal_senders = 0

Hello,

I have recently upgraded 10 Postgres databases to 11.2, these databases are used for data warehousing / ETL.  These are stand alone systems, no replication. They perform a lot of inserts, drop tables and create tables etc…

I have been working on tuning the databases, I am seeing the following in the log:

2019-09-03 10:40:21.660 EDT [5635] LOG:  checkpoints are occurring too frequently (13 seconds apart)

2019-09-03 10:40:21.660 EDT [5635] HINT:  Consider increasing the configuration parameter "max_wal_size".

My first thought was to increase the max_wal_size which may take care of the logged message.  Then I looked at the wal_level setting.  I see that it defaults to replica out of the box and max_wal_senders = 10.

postgres=# show wal_level;

wal_level

-----------

replica

(1 row)

postgres=# show max_wal_senders;

max_wal_senders

-----------------

10

(1 row)

The question I have is, for a production database not doing replication, can I safely set the following parameters, I understand that minimal will also disable wal_archiving so I am concerned about that as well.

wal_level = minimal

max_wal_senders = 0

I have been looking at the documentation and I guess I am looking for a yes this is ok, I figured it’s on by default for a reason so I was hesitant to change it.

Jason Ralph