Wiki / Configuration Parameters

The archive_command or archive_library is only invoked for completed WAL segments. Hence, if your server generates little WAL traffic (or has slack periods where it does so), there could be a long delay between the completion of a transaction and its safe recording in archive storage. To limit how old unarchived data can be, you can set archive_timeout to force the server to switch to a new WAL segment file periodically. When this parameter is greater than zero, the server will switch to a new segment file whenever this amount of time has elapsed since the last segment file switch, and there has been any database activity, including a single checkpoint (checkpoints are skipped if there is no database activity). Note that archived files that are closed early due to a forced switch are still the same length as completely full files. Therefore, it is unwise to use a very short archive_timeout — it will bloat your archive storage. archive_timeout settings of a minute or so are usually reasonable. You should consider using streaming replication, instead of archiving, if you want data to be copied off the primary server more quickly than that. If this value is specified without units, it is taken as seconds. This parameter can only be set in the postgresql.conf file or on the server command line.

English manual coverage begins with PostgreSQL 7.4. Source history and runtime observations have their own recorded version boundaries.

boot val

0

category

Write-Ahead Log / Archiving

context

sighup

documented

true

enumvals

Unknown

extra desc

0 disables the timeout.

lang

en

max val

1073741823

metadata version

18

min val

0

name

archive_timeout

short desc

Sets the amount of time to wait before forcing a switch to the next WAL file.

source

pg-settings-source-snapshot

unit

s

vartype

integer