Re: Reducing excess files in pg_xlog

Thom Brown wrote:

I noticed there's 66 files in my pg_xlog directory.  I changed my checkpoint_segments from 32 to 3 as I noticed it was too high, restarted PosgreSQL, but there are still 66 files in that directory and they're taking up about 1.1G.
How can I get this list of files down?

A checkpoint after there's been some write activity in the database should reduce this down to a reasonable number.  If the system has been idle since the last checkpoint, it doesn't do anything when you ask for another one, which includes skipping this cleanup; that may be why you haven't seen it drop yet.

I'm assuming you don't have WAL shipping turned on by setting archive_command.  There can also be an excess of these segments that can't be cleaned up if your archiving scheme fails.