[rt-users] Excessive communication between RT and postgresql

[Jacobsson, Henrik G]

We upgraded from 4.0.17.

Yes. Stopping RT stopped the WAL generation. Continued as if nothing happened when started up again.

The mail into the system should be quite negligible in this case since that would make the database grow in roughly the same pace as the WAL log generation, but the database has grown only 200M while there has been written more than 500G of WAL.

pg_xlogdump shows that more than 99% of the activity is due to inserts, deletes and subsequent vacuuming on rt4.sessions and corresponding toast tables.

Regards
//Henrik


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-----Original Message-----
From: rt-users-bounces at lists.bestpractical.com [mailto:rt-users-bounces at lists.bestpractical.com] On Behalf Of Alex Vandiver
Sent: den 16 december 2013 23:17
To: rt-users at lists.bestpractical.com
Subject: Re: [rt-users] Excessive communication between RT and postgresql

On Mon, 2013-12-16 at 13:58 +0000, Jacobsson, Henrik G wrote:
> After upgrading to RT 4.2.1, the postgresql database is producing 
> massive volumes of WAL files around the clock with peaks during office 
> hours.

And what version were you upgrading from?

> Before the upgrade – we had very limited volumes of WAL files 
> produced, and nothing at all during non work hours. Now – at least 
> 32MB, but usually 64MB of WAL is written every minute, when the system 
> is supposed to be quiet.

Does that output cease if you temporarily turn off the webserver?  What about if you disable your incoming MTA?

> Should there be any traffic at all between the RT server and database 
> server when the system is not in use? Apart from occasional handshakes 
> etc.

Depends what you mean by "in use."  RT has no long-running programs aside from the web front-end; as such, requests to the database are only generated by requests to Apache, or the cron jobs.  At times when there are no Apache requests and no cron jobs, there should be no significant database traffic.

Bear in mind that even if no _users_ are accessing the website, incoming email gets POST'ed to the mail gateway endpoint, which may account for some of the activity when you believe the system is not in use.

It may be enlightening to examine the generated WAL logs using http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/pgxlogdump.html
 - Alex