Re: [PERFORM] DELETE vs TRUNCATE explanation

On 07/16/2012 09:37 AM, Tom Lane wrote:
>> There's one way that doesn't have any housekeeping cost to Pg. It's
>> pretty bad manners if there's anybody other than Pg on the system though:
>>     sync()
> Yeah, I thought about that: if we could document that issuing a manual
> sync after turning fsync on leaves you in a guaranteed-good state once
> the sync is complete, it'd probably be fine.  However, I'm not convinced
> that we could promise that with a straight face.  In the first place,
> PG has only very weak guarantees about how quickly all processes in the
> system will absorb a GUC update.  In the second place, I'm not entirely
> sure that there aren't race conditions around checkpoints and the fsync
> request queue (particularly if we do what Jeff is suggesting and
> suppress queuing requests at the upstream end).  It might be all right,
> or it might be all right after expending some work, but the whole thing
> is not an area where I think anyone wants to spend time.  I think it'd
> be much safer to document that the correct procedure is "stop the
> database, do a manual sync, enable fsync in postgresql.conf, restart the
> database".  And if that's what we're documenting, we lose little or
> nothing by marking fsync as PGC_POSTMASTER.
Sounds reasonable to me; I tend to view fsync=off as a testing feature 
anyway. Will clone onto -general and see if anyone yells.

--
Craig Ringer