Re: should we enable log_checkpoints out of the box?

From: Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us>
To: Michael Banck <michael(dot)banck(at)credativ(dot)de>
Cc: Andres Freund <andres(at)anarazel(dot)de>, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us>, Bharath Rupireddy <bharath(dot)rupireddyforpostgres(at)gmail(dot)com>, PostgreSQL Hackers <pgsql-hackers(at)lists(dot)postgresql(dot)org>, Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com>
Subject: Re: should we enable log_checkpoints out of the box?
Date: 2021-11-02 23:46:46
Message-ID: 20211102234646.GB17209@momjian.us
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On Sun, Oct 31, 2021 at 10:24:38PM +0100, Michael Banck wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 31, 2021 at 01:16:33PM -0700, Andres Freund wrote:
> > Shrug. It's based on many years of doing or being around people doing
> > postgres support escalation shifts. And it's not like log_checkpoints
> > incurs meaningful overhead or causes that much log volume.
>
> It could be a bit of reverse-survivorship-bias, i.e., you're only seeing
> the pathological cases, while 99% of the Postgres installations out
> there just hum along fine without anybody ever having to look at the
> checkpoint entries in the log.
>
> But yeah, for serious production instances, it makes sense to turn that
> option on, but I'm not convinced it should be the default.

Yes, I agree with this analysis. There is a sense that people who
regularly diagnose Postgres problems want this information in the logs
by default, while the majority of sites might want silent logs for
normal query activity.

I realize in this thread that Robert Haas mentioned foreign key
violations that would like also appear in logs, but those are
ERROR/WARNING etc. messages that can be filtered out with
log_min_message. I think if we want to offer a more verbose set of
analytic output, by default or not, we might want to relabel them as
something other than LOG messages so they can be filtered out with
log_min_messages.

--
Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> https://momjian.us
EDB https://enterprisedb.com

If only the physical world exists, free will is an illusion.

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