Re: [PATCHES] O_DIRECT for WAL writes
Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
From: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
To: Gavin Sherry <swm@linuxworld.com.au>
Cc: Curt Sampson <cjs@cynic.net>, Greg Stark <gsstark@mit.edu>, ITAGAKI Takahiro <itagaki.takahiro@lab.ntt.co.jp>, pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org
Date: 2005-06-23T04:33:35Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
Gavin Sherry <swm@linuxworld.com.au> writes: >> Curt Sampson <cjs@cynic.net> writes: >>> But is it really a problem? I somewhere got the impression that some >>> drives, on power failure, will be able to keep going for long enough to >>> write out the cache and park the heads anyway. If so, the drive is still >>> guaranteeing the write. > I've seen discussion about disks behaving this way. There's no magic: > they're battery backed. Oh, sure, then it's easy ;-) The bottom line here seems to be the same as always: you can't run an industrial strength database on piece-of-junk consumer grade hardware. Our problem is that because the software is free, people expect to run it on bottom-of-the-line Joe Bob's Bait And PC Shack hardware, and then they blame us when they don't get the same results as the guy running Oracle on million-dollar triply-redundant server hardware. Oh well. regards, tom lane