Re: Page Checksums

Jim Nasby <jim@nasby.net>

From: Jim Nasby <jim@nasby.net>
To: Simon Riggs <simon@2ndquadrant.com>
Cc: Heikki Linnakangas <heikki.linnakangas@enterprisedb.com>, Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com>, David Fetter <david@fetter.org>, Stephen Frost <sfrost@snowman.net>, Aidan Van Dyk <aidan@highrise.ca>, Josh Berkus <josh@agliodbs.com>, pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org, Greg Smith <greg@2ndQuadrant.com>, Koichi Suzuki <koichi.szk@gmail.com>
Date: 2012-01-10T00:12:06Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
On Jan 8, 2012, at 5:25 PM, Simon Riggs wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 19, 2011 at 8:18 PM, Heikki Linnakangas
> <heikki.linnakangas@enterprisedb.com> wrote:
> 
>> Double-writes would be a useful option also to reduce the size of WAL that
>> needs to be shipped in replication.
>> 
>> Or you could just use a filesystem that does CRCs...
> 
> Double writes would reduce the size of WAL and we discussed many times
> we want that.
> 
> Using a filesystem that does CRCs is basically saying "let the
> filesystem cope". If that is an option, why not just turn full page
> writes off and let the filesystem cope?

I don't think that just because a filesystem CRC's that you can't have a torn write.

Filesystem CRCs very likely will not happen to data that's in the cache. For some users, that's a huge amount of data to leave un-protected.

Filesystem bugs do happen... though presumably most of those would be caught by the filesystem's CRC check... but you never know!
--
Jim C. Nasby, Database Architect                   jim@nasby.net
512.569.9461 (cell)                         http://jim.nasby.net