Re: [HACKERS] Performance while loading data and indexing

On Thu, 2002-09-26 at 16:03, Neil Conway wrote:
> Bruce Momjian <pgman(at)candle(dot)pha(dot)pa(dot)us> writes:
> > Wow. That leaves no good Linux file system alternatives.
> > PostgreSQL just wants an ordinary file system that has reliable
> > recovery from a crash.
>
> I'm not really familiar with the reasoning behind ext2's reputation as
> recovering poorly from crashes; if we fsync a WAL record to disk
> before we lose power, can't we recover reliably, even with ext2?

Well, I have experienced data loss from ext2 before. Also, recovery
from crashes on large file systems take a very, very long time. I can't
imagine anyone running a production database on an ext2 file system
having 10's or even 100's of GB. Ouch. Recovery would take forever!
Even recovery on small file systems (2-8G) can take extended periods of
time. Especially so on IDE systems. Even then manual intervention is
not uncommon.

While I can't say that x, y or z is the best FS to use on Linux, I can
say that ext2 is probably an exceptionally poor choice from a
reliability and/or uptime perspective.

Greg