Re: Should pg_stat_bgwriter.buffers_backend_fsync be removed?

On Tue, Apr 29, 2014 at 5:54 AM, Peter Geoghegan <pg(at)heroku(dot)com> wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 29, 2014 at 2:51 AM, Bernd Helmle <mailings(at)oopsware(dot)de> wrote:
>>> I suggest removing it for 9.5, and instead logging individual
>>> occurrences of backend fsync requests within ForwardFsyncRequest(). It
>>> seems fair to treat that as an anomaly to draw particular attention
>>> to.
>>
>> But wouldn't that make it more complicated/unlikely to discover cases, where
>> it still doesn't work?
>
> I don't think so, no.

I think it just depends. For people who are running a log scraper
anyway, a message would be better than a statistics counter, because
it's one less thing to check. For people who are running something
that monitors the stats views anyway, but perhaps not a log scraper,
the counter is better.

Overall, I don't see much reason to tinker with this. If we had no
reporting at all of this condition now, I'd probably be mildly more
supportive of adding a log message than a counter. But since we've
already got something and there's no real problem with it, I'm
disinclined to make a change.

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company