Reduce how much old WAL we keep around. (#7098)

brian-brazil · web-flow · commit cd73b3d33e06 · 2020-04-07T15:55:57.000+05:30
Previously we were keeping up to around 6 hours of WAL around by
removing 1/3 every hours. This was excessive, so switch to removing 2/3
which will up to around 3 hours of WAL around.

This will roughly halve the size of the WAL and halve startup time for
those who are I/O bound. This may increase the checkpoint size for
those with certain churn patterns, but by much less than we're saving
from the segments.

Signed-off-by: Brian Brazil &lt;brian.brazil@robustperception.io&gt;
diff --git a/tsdb/head.go b/tsdb/head.go
@@ -681,9 +681,11 @@ func (h *Head) Truncate(mint int64) (err error) {
 	if last < 0 {
 		return nil // no segments yet.
 	}
-	// The lower third of segments should contain mostly obsolete samples.
-	// If we have less than three segments, it's not worth checkpointing yet.
-	last = first + (last-first)/3
+	// The lower two thirds of segments should contain mostly obsolete samples.
+	// If we have less than two segments, it's not worth checkpointing yet.
+	// With the default 2h blocks, this will keeping up to around 3h worth
+	// of WAL segments.
+	last = first + (last-first)*2/3
 	if last <= first {
 		return nil
 	}
