Re: allow segment size to be set to < 1GiB

On Tue, Nov 8, 2022 at 8:06 AM Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
>
> Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de> writes:
> > On 2022-11-07 12:52:25 -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
> >> How about instead allowing the segment size to be set in pages?
>
> > In addition or instead of --with-segsize/-Dsegsize?
>
> In addition to.  What I meant by "instead" was to replace
> your proposal of --with-segsize-mb.
>
> > Just offering the number of pages seems like a not great UI.
>
> Well, it's a developer/debug focused API.  I think regular users
> would only care for the existing --with-segsize = so-many-GB API.
> But for testing, I think --with-segsize-pages = so-many-pages
> is actually a pretty good UI.

Perhaps --with-segsize-blocks is a better name here as we use block
instead of page for --with-blocksize and --with-wal-blocksize.

If this option is for dev/debug purposes only, do we want to put a
mechanism to disallow it in release builds or something like that,
just in case? Or at least, add a note in the documentation?

-- 
Bharath Rupireddy
PostgreSQL Contributors Team
RDS Open Source Databases
Amazon Web Services: https://aws.amazon.com