So I was testing slony-1.0.1 against a development version of a 
database for which I'd eventually like to use Slony as a production 
replication solution and got some strange results.

I've mentioned a few characteristics of the database I'm working with 
on this list before, but to lay it out again:

1. There are thousands of relations.
2. Thousands of them are inherited from a few dozen superclasses.
3. Thousands of them do not have primary keys or columns with unique 
constraints.

So just to benchmark Slony's performance, I decided that I would just 
try to replicate the sequences and the relations with primary keys 
(which still amount to thousands). I used my automated slonik builder 
and came up with slonik scripts that seemed to set up Slony correctly 
with one master and one slave node. I started up slon and began the 
subscription process, and the information in the log files indicated 
that Slony was attempting to work.

On these same servers, I had successfully verified that Slony was 
working with the pg_bench examples with our particular configuration 
(which is based on postgresql-7.4.1), so everything looked as if it 
were going well.

Disk usage began to grow. And grow. And grow. Eventually, Slony filled 
up the entire 60GB /var partition where the data directory was living. 
The weird part was, once Slony had stopped because /var was full, I 
couldn't find evidence that any of my replicated tables had rows. I had 
copied the schema over beforehand, and everything with that looked 
fine, but all of my row counts were zero. What was even odder was that 
looking in pg_class to discover which database objects were eating up 
space, but there was nothing significant about any of the values in 
relpages.

Further, nothing in the logs on the master looked strange, and there 
was nothing significant in the logs on the slave.

I'm just wondering if there's anyone who has seen any behavior like 
this or knows what might have happened. I'm especially curious about 
the status of the data.

We're currently in the process of reconfiguring our servers, and I 
needed to reclaim the space from the partition that filled up, so I 
uninstalled and dropped the slave database, but I'll continue 
experimenting in a few weeks.

-tfo