Re: [HACKERS] WAL archiving idle database

[Jeff Davis <pgsql(at)j-davis(dot)com>]

On Fri, 2007-10-26 at 18:47 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> Jeff Davis <pgsql(at)j-davis(dot)com> writes:
> > What's happening is that you have a checkpoint_timeout of 5 minutes, and
> > that checkpoint must write a checkpoint record in the WAL, prompting the
> > archiving.
> 
> > If you want it to happen less frequently, it's often safe to have
> > checkpoint timeout set to something larger by a reasonable amount. 
> 
> I think you're confusing checkpoint_timeout and archive_timeout...

Thanks for clarifying it. The user-visible behavior, as I understand it,
is that the time between archiving on an idle database is:
MAX(archive_timeout,checkpoint_timeout)

[ of course, there's no guarantee that the archive_command succeeds in
that time ]

It looks like checkpoint_timeout was the limiting factor, in his case.

Regards,
	Jeff Davis