Re: wal segment size

Colin 't Hart <colinthart@gmail.com>

From: "Colin 't Hart" <colinthart@gmail.com>
To: Laurenz Albe <laurenz.albe@cybertec.at>
Cc: PostgreSQL General <pgsql-general@lists.postgresql.org>
Date: 2025-12-17T16:10:19Z
Lists: pgsql-general
Thanks Laurenz, that confirms what I was assuming. Archiving is via
pgbackrest to a backup server, over SSH. Approx 750ms to archive each
segment is crazy -- I'll check compression parameters too.

Any reason not to bump it up to 1GB? Or is that overkill?

/Colin

On Wed, 17 Dec 2025 at 16:25, Laurenz Albe <laurenz.albe@cybertec.at> wrote:

> On Wed, 2025-12-17 at 16:13 +0100, Colin 't Hart wrote:
> > I see very little advice on tuning WAL segment size.
> >
> > One of my clients has a few datawarehouses at around 8 - 16 TB
> >
> > On one of the nodes there are approx 15000 WAL segments of 16MB each,
> totalling
> > approx 230GB. The archiver is archiving approx one per second, so approx
> 4 hours to clear.
> >
> > Would we gain anything by bumping the WAL segment size?
>
> Very likely yes, if the problem is the overhead of starting the
> archive_command.
>
> Another thing that can slow down archiving is if you compress these
> segments
> too aggressively.
>
> Yours,
> Laurenz Albe
>