On Tue, Jul 6, 2010 at 7:10 PM, Richard Yen <richyen at iparadigms.com> wrote:
> This leads me to believe that there was a sudden flurry of write activity that occurred, and the process that would flush WAL files to /db/data/ couldn't keep up, thereby filling up the disk.  I'm wondering if anyone else out there might be able to give me some insight or comments to my assessment--is it accurate?  Any input would be helpful, and I'll try to make necessary architectural changes to keep this from happening again.

I tend to agree.  What kind of disk setup is under your data store?
If it's RAID-5 or RAID-6 is it possibly degraded?

I'd run iostat -xd 10 while the write load it high to see how your
xlog partition %util compares to the main data store partition.

Do you have your main data store partition under a battery backed
caching RAID controller?  Tell us what you can about your hardware
setup.