[gfv]

How long do you keep the transaction logs before rewriting them?

I too had a few EC2 instances go down with signs of being severed from the EBS in the recent couple of weeks; mine were in eu-west.

[cperciva]

There's a continual background cleaning process which depends on the amount of storage which can be reclaimed -- there's a tradeoff between cleaning too slowly (and paying for wasted storage) and cleaning too fast (and paying for lots of S3 operations). I think it averages a couple weeks right now.