Just turned on WAL archiving to an S3 bucket for a small database - total size of perhaps 2-4G. After turning on achiving, we're seeing WAL logs written to S3 at the rate of about 1G every 3 minutes. That seems completely unreasonable given usage of the db. I can even see that nearly nothing is happening with this:
select datname, usename, procpid, client_addr, waiting, query_start, current_query from pg_stat_activity;
Nearly every time I run that, all 20 connections have current_query = '<IDLE>'. Does current_query include inserts, updates, and deletes or just select statements?
Any ideas what to look for or how to solve this?
Can you show the results from:
SELECT name, current_setting(name), source FROM pg_settings WHERE source NOT IN ('default', 'override') UNION ALL SELECT 'version' as name, version(), null;
Perhaps there is a setting there (like archive_timeout) which could lead to an answer. In your $PGDATA/pg_xlog directory, look at the timestamps of the WAL segments, are there lots of files generated per minute?
