What Is Archiving?
Archiving in PostgreSQL refers to saving WAL (Write-Ahead Log) files for long-term storage or backup. It's essential for point-in-time recovery and ensuring that no data is lost between backups. Archive mode must be enabled in the config.
Why It Matters for PostgreSQL Performance
In PostgreSQL performance work, Archiving affects throughput, latency, or operational reliability depending on workload and configuration.
Practical Benchmarking Context
When benchmarking with pgbench, track how Archiving changes behavior across scale factor, client concurrency, and storage conditions.
Use this term together with workload shape, concurrency level, and scale factor when interpreting pgbench outputs. Isolated values can be misleading without full run context.
Example
Setting: archive_mode = on , archive_command