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Hello,
I'm using PostgreSQL to log web traffic leaving our network. This
results in the database growing to a fairly large size. This machine
will be left unattended and basically unmaintained for long stretches of
time so I need a way to limit the disk space that Postgres uses. So far
I have come up with two basic ideas:
1. Routinely run 'du' in the directory containing the PostgreSQL data,
which in my case is /var/postgresql/data and when it gets to a certain
size remove a whole bunch of the old data from the database, and run
'vacuum full; reindex database db_name; analyze;'.
The problem with this is that the vacuum could take nearly an hour to
run in some cases and there will be data that needs to get logged during
this hour. Also, the vacuum process could use disk space above what the
database is currently using and that disk space may not be available.
2. Use pgstattuple() to determine how much space is being used at any
given time and delete a bunch of old rows from the database when it is
approaching a limit.
The nice thing about this is that 'vacuum full;' does not have to be
executed in order to see the space get reclaimed. The downside is that
running pgstattuple() is much more expensive than running 'du', so the
disk space checks can't happen as often, and they can not be run at all
during the day.
I am curious to know if anyone has any other ideas as to how I can limit
the disk space that PostgreSQL uses to say 5GB. I have not looked in to
pg_autovacuum yet, but from what I have read about it it does not seem
to be the answer to this problem. Has anyone else had to do such a
thing before? Does anyone have any ideas on how to do this better?
Thanks,
Mark Drago
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