My question is about the records kept in the controlfile. Here is a general backgroud for this question:
I have a Primary database and a physical standby database both in 12C version. The redo log files on the
primary database were so undersized (512M), the primary was generating on average, 400 archives per hour.
This caused the Standby to lag behind the primary sometimes by more than 3 hours. We discussed this with
Oracle support and we were told part of the issue is that the number of archive log entries in the
controlfile (around 708 thousand). My question is: Since the records keep time is seven days, why do those
entries persist for more than 7 days? How can we lower the number of entiries without creating a controlfile?

SQL> select type, records_used, records_total from v$controlfile_record_section where type like '%LOG%';

TYPE RECORDS_USED RECORDS_TOTAL
---------------------------- ------------ -------------
REDO LOG 190 192
LOG HISTORY 293888 293888
ARCHIVED LOG 707520 707520
BACKUP REDOLOG 0 430
FLASHBACK LOG 920 2048
FOREIGN ARCHIVED LOG 0 1002


NAME TYPE VALUE
------------------------------------ ----------- ------------
control_file_record_keep_time integer 7


Thank you for taking my question.