Re: BBU Cache vs. spindles

From: Alvaro Herrera <alvherre(at)commandprompt(dot)com>
To: Greg Smith <greg(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com>
Cc: Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us>, Scott Marlowe <scott(dot)marlowe(at)gmail(dot)com>, jd <jd(at)commandprompt(dot)com>, Ben Chobot <bench(at)silentmedia(dot)com>, Steve Crawford <scrawford(at)pinpointresearch(dot)com>, pgsql-performance <pgsql-performance(at)postgresql(dot)org>
Subject: Re: BBU Cache vs. spindles
Date: 2010-10-29 18:49:12
Message-ID: 1288377894-sup-2286@alvh.no-ip.org
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Excerpts from Greg Smith's message of jue oct 21 14:04:17 -0300 2010:

> What I would like to do is beef up the documentation with some concrete
> examples of how to figure out if your cache and associated write path
> are working reliably or not. It should be possible to include "does
> this handle full page writes correctly?" in that test suite. Until we
> have something like that, I'm concerned that bugs in filesystem or
> controller handling may make full_page_writes unsafe even with a BBU,
> and we'd have no way for people to tell if that's true or not.

I think if you assume that there are bugs in the filesystem which you
need to protect against, you are already hosed. I imagine there must be
some filesystem bug that makes it safe to have full_page_writes=on, but
unsafe to have full_page_writes=off; but I'd probably discard those as a
rare minority and thus not worth worrying about.

I agree it would be worth testing though.

--
Álvaro Herrera <alvherre(at)commandprompt(dot)com>
The PostgreSQL Company - Command Prompt, Inc.
PostgreSQL Replication, Consulting, Custom Development, 24x7 support

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