Jeremy Haile wrote:
> > > Once you free some space on the data partition and restart, you should
> > > be good to go --- there will be no loss of committed transactions, since
> > > all the operations are in pg_xlog. Might take a little while to replay
> > > all that log though :-(
> >
> > Amazing that all works. What I did not see is confirmation from the
> > user that the data directory filled up _before_ pg_xlog filled up.
>
> After I freed up space on the pg_xlog partition and restarted, it took
> some time to replay all of the log (15-20 minutes) and everything
> recovered with no data corruption! However, the theory about the data
> partition filling up first didn't happen in my case. The data partition
> was (and still is) less than 50% utilized. My pg_xlog files typically
> run around 400MB, but with the long running update filled up the entire
> 10GB partition. (which is now a 70 GB partition)
>
> So, I'm still not sure what caused the problem. When I get back to work
> (or maybe sooner), I'll take a look in the PG logs and post anything
> that looks suspicious here. Thanks for all of your comments and
> suggestions. Even though I haven't figured out the root of the problem
> yet, they've been very informative.
The bottom line is that we know of now cases where a long-running
transaction would delay recycling of the WAL files, so there is
certainly something not understood here.
--
Bruce Momjian bruce@momjian.us
EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com
+ If your life is a hard drive, Christ can be your backup. +