heroku/WAL-E — Issue #26: WAL-E Slows Down Postgres Shutdown
Author: russss
Created: 2012-01-13 01:29:38+00:00
State: open

If you do a lot of database activity (and your WAL archiving is over a relatively slow connection), then immediately shut down Postgres, it'll stall for a significant amount of time while it archives off the logs.

In most cases this isn't a problem, but sometimes you want to kick Postgres into listening on localhost, do some heavy maintenance, then restart it again to listen on "*".

So I suspect we might want to have the possibility for WAL-E to run as an asynchronous process, monitoring a directory, with the archive_command being "cp".