Re: [PATCHES] Reviewers Guide to Deferred Transactions/Transaction Guarantee

Zeugswetter Andreas DCP SD <zeugswettera@spardat.at>

From: "Zeugswetter Andreas ADI SD" <ZeugswetterA@spardat.at>
To: "Tom Lane" <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>, "Simon Riggs" <simon@2ndquadrant.com>
Cc: <pgsql-hackers@postgreSQL.org>
Date: 2007-04-13T13:40:31Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
I agree with Tom's reasoning about the suggested simplifications, sorry.

> > 3. Should the WALWriter also do the wal_buffers half-full write at
the 
> > start of XLogInsert() ?
> 
> That should go away entirely; to me the main point of the 
> separate wal-writer process is to take over responsibility 
> for not letting too many dirty wal buffers accumulate.

That also sounds a lot simpler, but I think Bruce wanted to be able to
give
some time guarantee to the not waiting for fsync txns.
When a commit only half-filled the page and no more WAL comes in for 
a long time, there is only WALWriter to do the IO.
The WALWriter would need to only flush a half-full page after timeout
iff it contains a commit record.

One more question on autocommit:
Do we wait for a flush for an autocommitted DML ?
Seems we generally should not.

Andreas