Thread: Reducing the size or amount of WAL files on the master server

Reducing the size or amount of WAL files on the master server

From
Shane Archer
Date:
On a master PostgreSQL 9.5 server, we consistently have 160-180GB of WAL files being stored, which span a 6-7 day time period. I'd like to reduce this so that we aren't using as much space, and also because we won't ever need to recover that far into the past (we'd just restore a backup at that point).

I've tried changing settings such as wal_keep_segments and max_wal_size but they don't seem to have an effect, even after a full server restart. For example, I've set max_wal_size to 256MB but the files themselves remain at 512MB.

Is there some part of the process I'm missing, or a setting?